UNIVERSITY  OF  CALIFORNIA 
AT   LOS  ANGELES 


THE  ROMANCE  OF  A  GREAT  STORE 


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The  Romance  of  a 
Great  Store 


h 

Edward  Hungerford 

Author  of 
'The  Personality  of  American  Cities"  "The  Modern  Railroad,"  etc. 


Illustrated  by 
Vernon  Howe  Bailey 


aWcw  Tork 

Robert  M.  McBride  &  Company 
1922 


COPYRIGHT,   1923,  BY 

ROBERT  M.  MCBRIDE  *  oo. 


Printed  in  the  United  States  of  America 


Published,   1923 


XI 


r. 
the  Men  and  Women 

of 

The  Great  Macy  Family 

Whose  Fidelity  and  Interest, 

Whose  Enthusiasm  and  Ability 

Have  Upbuilded 
A  Lasting  Institution  of  Worth 

in 

The  Heart  of  a  Vast  City 

This  Book  is  Affectionately  'Dedicated 

by  its  Author. 

to 

3  £.  H 


431766 


CONTENTS 

CHAPTER  PAGE 

INTRODUCTION ix 

Yesterday 

I.     THE  ANCESTRAL  BEGINNINGS  OF  MACY'S  3 
II.     THE   NEW   YORK   THAT   MACY   FIRST 

SAW 7 

III.  FOURTEENTH  STREET  DAYS     ....  31 

IV.  THE  COMING  OF  ISIDOR  AND   NATHAN 

STRAUS 47 

V.     THE  STORE  TREKS  UPTOWN     ....  63 

Today 

I.     A  DAY  IN  A  GREAT  STORE 87 

II.     ORGANIZATION  IN  A  MODERN  STORE     .  109 

III.  BUYING  TO  SELL 145 

IV.  DISPLAYING  AND  SELLING  THE  GOODS     .  163 
V.     DISTRIBUTING    THE    GOODS    .     .     .     .  185 

VI.     THE  MACY  FAMILY 201 

VII.    THE  FAMILY  AT  PLAY 233 

Tomorrow 

I.     IN  WHICH  MACY'S  PREPARES  TO  BUILD 

ANEW 255 

II.     L'ENVOI 279 


ILLUSTRATIONS 

The  New  York  to  Which  Macy  Came  —  in  1858 

Frontispiece 

FACING  PAGE 

The  Beginnings  of  Macy's 18 

The  Fourteenth  Street  Store  of  Other  Days  .  .  34 
The  Herald  Square  of  Ante-Macy  Days  .  .  66 

The  Macy's  of  Today 82 

Where  Milady  of  Manhattan  Shops  .  .  .  .114 
The  Science  of  Modern  Salesmanship  .  .  .  .210 
The  Summer  Home  of  the  Macy  Family  .  .  .  242 


Introduction 

« /CAVEAT  EMPTOR,"  the  Romans  said,  in 
\*Ji  their  day. 

"Let  the  Buyer  beware,"  we  would  read  that  phrase, 
today. 

For  nearly  four  thousand  years,  perhaps  longer, 
caveat  em-ptor  ruled  the  hard  world  of  barter.  Yet 
for  the  past  sixty  years,  or  thereabouts,  a  new  principle 
has  come  into  merchandising.  You  may  call  it 
progress,  call  it  idealism,  call  it  ethics,  call  it  what  you 
will.  I  simply  call  it  good  business. 

Caveat  emftor  has  become  a  phrase  thrust  out  of 
good  merchandising.  It  is  a  pariah.  The  decent 
merchant  of  today  despises  it.  On  the  contrary  he 
prides  himself  upon  the  honor  of  his  calling,  upon  the 
high  value  of  his  good  name,  untarnished.  The  man 
or  the  woman  who  comes  into  his  store  may  come  with 
the  faith  or  the  simplicity  of  the  child.  He  or  she 
may  even  be  bereft  of  sight,  itself — yet  deal  in  faith 
and  fearlessly. 

Caveat  em-ptor  is  indeed  a  dead  phrase. 

How  and  whence  came  this  murder  of  a  commercial 
derelict? 

You  may  laugh  and  at  first  you  may  scoff,  but  the 
fact  remains  that  the  development  of  the  department 

ix 


x  Introduction 

store  as  we  know  it  in  the  United  States  today  first 
began  some  sixty  or  sixty-five  years  ago.  And  almost 
coincidently  began  the  development  of  a  code  of  morals 
in  merchandising  such  as  was  all  but  undreamed  of  in 
this  land,  at  any  rate  up  to  a  decade  or  two  before  the 
coming  of  the  Civil  War.  Not  that  there  were  no 
honest  merchants  in  those  earlier  days  of  the  republic. 
Oh  no,  there  was  a  plenty  of  them — men  whose  in- 
tegrity and  whose  sincerity  were  as  little  to  be  doubted 
as  are  those  same  qualities  in  our  best  merchants  of 
today.  Only  yesterday  these  honest  men  were  in  the 
minority.  The  moral  code  in  merchandising  was  yet 
inchoate,  unformed. 

It  might  remain  unformed,  intangible  today  if  it 
had  not  been  for  the  coming  of  the  department  store. 
The  enormous  consolidation  and  concentration  that 
went  to  make  these  enterprises  possible  brought  with 
them  a  competition — bitter  and  to  the  end  unflinch- 
ing— which  hesitated  at  no  legitimate  means  for  the 
gaining  of  its  end.  But  competition  quickly  found 
that  the  best  means — the  finest  battle-sword — was 
honest  commercial  practice,  and  so  girded  that  sword 
to  its  belt  and  bade  caveat  em-ptor  begone. 

The  great  department  store  around  which  these 
chapters  are  written  assumes  for  itself,  neither  yes- 
terday, today  nor  tomorrow,  any  monopoly  of  this 
virtue  of  commercial  honesty.  But  it  does  assert,  and 
will  continue  to  assert  that  it  was  at  least  among  the 
pioneers  in  the  complete  banishment  of  caveat  emptor, 
that  its  founder — the  man  whose  name  it  so  proudly 
bears  today — fought  for  these  high  principles  when 


Introduction  xi 

the  fighting  was  at  the  hardest  and  the  temptations  to 
move  in  the  other  direction  were  most  alluring. 

Of  these  principles  you  shall  read  in  the  oncoming 
chapters  of  this  book.  There  are  many,  they  are 
varied — in  some  respects  they  vary  greatly  from  those 
upon  which  other  and  equally  successful  and  equally 
honest  merchandising  establishments  are  today  oper- 
ated. Macy's  has  no  quarrel  with  any  of  its  com- 
petitors. It  merely  writes  upon  the  record  that,  for 
itself,  it  is  quite  satisfied  with  the  merchandising 
principles  that  its  founder  and  the  men  who  came  after 
him  saw  fit  to  establish.  Upon  those  the  store  has 
prospered — and  prospered  greatly.  And  because  of 
such  prosperity — social  as  well  as  commercial — because 
it  feels  that  its  selling  principles  are  quite  as  valuable 
to  its  patrons  as  to  the  store  itself,  it  has  no  intention 
of  giving  change  to  them.  Macy's  of  today  is  like  in 
soul  and  spirit  to  Macy's  of  yesterday  j  Macy's  of 
tomorrow  is  planned  to  be  like  unto  the  Macy's  of 
today — only  vastly  larger  in  its  scope  and  influence. 

For  the  convenience  of  the  reader  this  book  has 
been  divided  into  three  great  parts,  or  books.  Time 
has  formed  the  logical  factor  of  division.  Time,  as 
in  the  theater,  forms  these  three  books,  or  acts — 
Yesterday,  Today,  Tomorrow.  They  move  in  sequence. 
The  stage-hands  are  placing  the  setting  for  the  New 
York  of  yesterday — the  New  York  that  already  has 
begun  to  fade,  far  from  the  eyes  of  even  the  oldest 
of  the  humans  who  shall  come  to  read  these  pages. 
It  is  a  charming  New  York,  this  American  city  of  the 
late  'fifties,  the  city  whose  ladies  go  shopping  in  hoop- 


xii  Introduction 

skirts  and  in  crinoline.      It  has  dignity,  taste,  bustle, 
enterprise. 

But  anon  of  these.  The  stage  is  set.  The  director's 
foot  comes  stamping  down  upon  the  boards.  The 
curtain  rises.  The  first  act  begins. 


Yesterday 


I.     The  Ancestral  Beginnings  of 
Macy's 

INTERWOVEN  into  the  history  of  the  ancient 
island  of  Nantucket  are  the  names  and  annals  of 
some  of  the  earliest  of  our  American  families — the 
Coffins,  the  Eldredges,  the  Myricks,  and  the  Macys. 
Their  forbears  came  from  England  to  America  fully 
ten  generations  ago.  They  settled  upon  the  remote 
and  wind-swept  isle  and  there  to  this  day  many  of 
their  descendants  ply  their  vocations  and  have  their 
homes. 

In  the  beginning  the  vocation  of  these  settlers  was 
found  to  lie  almost  invariably  upon  a  single  path;  and 
that  path  led  down  to  the  sea.  They  were  sea-faring 
folk,  those  early  residents  of  Nantucket:  God-fearing, 
simple  of  speech  and  of  action,  yet  mentally  keen  and 
alert.  And  from  them  sprang  the  segment  of  a  race 
which  was  soon  to  grow  far  beyond  the  narrow  barriers 
of  the  little  island  and  to  spread  its  splendid  enthusiasm 
and  energy  far  into  a  newborn  land. 

Among  the  very  earliest  of  these  Nantucket  settlers 
was  one  Thomas  Macy,  who,  from  the  beginning,  took 
his  fair  place  in  the  development  of  its  fishing 
and  its  whaling  industries.  From  him  came  a  long 
line  of  descendants — a  clean  and  sturdy  record — and 
in  the  eighth  generation  of  these  there  was  born — on 

3 


4  The  Romance  of  a  Great  Store 

August  29,  1822 — as  the  son  of  John  and  Eliza  Myrick 
Macy,  the  man  whose  name  chiefly  concerns  this 
book — Rowland  Hussey  Macy. 

The  record  of  this  young  man's  youth  is  not  so  con- 
sequential as  to  be  worth  the  setting  down  in  detail. 
It  is  enough  perhaps  to  know  that  at  the  age  of  fifteen 
he  followed  the  common  Nantucket  custom  of  those 
days  and  went  away  to  seaj  upon  a  whaling  voyage 
which  was  to  consume  four  long  years  before  again  he 
saw  the  belfried  white  spire  of  the  South  Church  rising 
through  the  trees  back  of  the  harbor  and  which  was  to 
make  him  in  fact  as  well  as  in  name,  Captain  Macy. 

Three  years  later  he  married.  He  chose  for  his 
wife,  Miss  Louisa  Houghton,  of  Fairlees,  Vermont. 
Their  pleasant  married  life  continued  for  thirty-three 
years,  until  the  day  of  Mr.  Macy's  death.  Mrs.  Macy 
lived  for  several  years  afterwards,  dying  in  New  York 
City  in  1886.  They  had  three  children,  one  of  whom, 
Mrs.  James  F.  Sutton,  the  widow  of  the  founder  of 
the  American  Art  Galleries  in  New  York,  still  survives 
and  is  living  at  her  suburban  home  in  Westchester 
County. 

Such  is  the  simple  statistical  record  of  the  man  who 
lived  to  be  one  of  New  York's  great  merchant  princes, 
who,  upon  the  simple  foundations  of  good  merchandis- 
ing, of  strength,  integrity  and  initiative,  upbuilded  one 
of  the  great  and  most  distinctive  businesses  of  the 
greatest  city  of  the  two  American  continents.  Back 
of  it  is  another  record — not  so  simple  or  so  quickly 
told.  It  is  the  story  of  successes  and  of  sorrows,  of 
triumphs  and  of  failures — but  in  the  end  of  the  final 


The  Ancestral  Beginnings  of  Macy's  5 

triumph  of  New  England  conscience  and  energy  and 
vision.  It  is  with  this  last  story  that  this  book  has  its 
beginning. 

It  was  not  many  moons  after  his  marriage  that  young 
Macy  started  in  business,  in  store-keeping  in  Boston. 
He  was  convinced  that  the  sea  was  no  calling  for  a 
married  man,  and,  with  the  Yankee's  native  taste  for 
trading,  decided  that  the  career  of  the  merchant  was 
the  one  that  had  the  largest  appeal  to  him.  So  he 
made  immediate  steps  in  that  direction. 

The  record  of  that  early  Boston  store  is  meagre.  It 
is  enough,  perhaps,  to  say  here  and  now  that  it  failed, 
and  that  if  its  collapse  had  really  dismayed  the  young 
merchant,  this  book  would  not  have  been  written.  As 
it  was,  the  failure  seemed  but  to  stir  him  toward 
renewed  efforts.  He  stood  in  the  back  of  his  little 
store  and  flipped  a  coin.  It  was  a  habit  of  his  in  all 
periods  of  indecision. 

"Heads  up,  and  I  go  north,"  said  he.  "Tails  and 
next  week  I  start  south." 

Heads  came.  And  Rowland  Macy  and  his  wife 
went  north.  They  went  to  Haverhill  and  there  upon 
the  bank  of  the  Merrimac  he  set  up  his  second  store. 
This  venture  was  far  more  successful  than  the  first. 
It  prospered,  if  not  in  large  degree,  at  least  far  enough 
to  encourage  its  proprietor.  But  he  did  not  cease 
regretting  that  the  coin  had  not  come  tails-up.  Then 
he  would  have  gone  to  New  York.  For  New  York, 
he  was  convinced,  was  about  to  become  the  undisputed 
metropolis  of  the  land.  Already  it  was  going  ahead, 


6  The  Romance  of  a  Great  Store 

by  leaps  and  bounds.  And  men  who  slipped  into  it 
quickly  and  who  possessed  the  right  qualities  of  com- 
mercial ability  would  go  ahead  quickly.  Rowland 
Macy  was  convinced  of  this. 

He  was  not  a  man  who  lost  much  time  in  vain 
repinings.  To  New  York  he  would  go.  He  suited 
action  to  thought,  sold  his  Haverhill  business  at  a  fair 
profit,  again  bundled  his  wife  and  small  family  to- 
gether and  set  out  for  the  metropolis  of  the  New 
World. 


II.    The  New  York  That  Macy 
First  Saw 

IN  1858  New  York  was  just  beginning  to  come  into 
its  own.  It  was  ceasing  to  be  an  overgrown 
town — half  village,  half  city — and  was  attaining  a  real 
metropolitanism.  It  had  already  reached  a  population 
of  650,000  persons,  and  was  adding  to  that  number  at 
the  rate  of  from  twelve  thousand  to  fifteen  thousand 
annually.  Its  real  and  personal  property  was  assessed 
at  upward  of  $513,000,000.  New  building  was  going 
apace  at  a  fearful  rate.  Already  the  town  was  fairly 
closely  builded  up  to  Forty-ninth  Street,  and  was  paved 
to  Forty-second.  Above  it  up  on  Manhattan  Island 
were  many  suburban  villages:  Bloomingdale,  where 
Mayor  Fernando  Wood  had  his  residence,  upon  a  plot 
about  the  size  of  the  present  crossing  of  Broadway  and 
Seventy-second  Street,  Yorkville,  Harlem  and  Man- 
hattanville.  To  reach  the  first  two  of  these  communi- 
ties one  could  take  certain  of  the  horse  railroads.  John 
Stephenson  had  perfected  his  horse-car  and  these 
modern  equipages — how  quaint  and  old-fashioned  they 
would  seem  today — were  already  plying  in  Second, 
Third,  Sixth,  Eighth  and  Ninth  Avenues.  Slowly  but 
surely  they  were  displacing  the  omnibuses,  which  dated 
back  more  than  half  a  century.  A  goodly  number  of 
these  still  remained,  however  j  twenty-six  lines  employ- 

7 


8  The  Romance  of  a  Great  Store 

ing  in  all  489  separate  stages — New  York  certainly  was 
a  considerable  town. 

To  reach  the  more  remote  communities  of  Manhat- 
tan Island — Harlem  or  Manhattan ville — one  took  the 
steam-cars:  either  the  trains  of  the  Hudson  River  Rail- 
road in  the  little  old  station  at  Chambers  Street  and 
West  Broadway,  from  which  they  proceeded  up  to  the 
west  side  of  the  island  and,  as  to  this  day,  through  a 
goodly  portion  of  Tenth  Avenue,  or  else  the  trains  of 
the  New  York  &  Harlem,  or  the  New  York  &  New 
Haven,  from  their  separate  terminals  back  of  the  City 
Hall  and  Canal  Street  up  through  Fourth  Avenue,  the 
tunnel  under  Yorkville  Hill  and  thence  across  the 
Harlem  Plain  to  the  river  of  the  same  name.  A  little 
later  these  railroads  were  to  consolidate  their  terminals, 
in  a  huge  block-square  structure  at  Madison  and  Fourth 
Avenues,  Twenty-sixth  and  Twenty-seventh  Streets, 
the  forerunner  of  the  present  Madison  Square  Garden  j 
but  the  first  of  the  three  successive  Grand  Central 
Stations  was  not  to  come  until  1871. 

Fifth  Avenue,  too,  was  just  beginning  to  come  into 
its  own.  Some  of  the  handsome  homes  in  the  lower 
reaches  of  that  thoroughfare  and  upon  the  northern 
edge  of  Washington  Square  which  have  been  suffered 
to  remain  until  this  day  had  already  been  built  and  an 
exodus  had  begun  to  them  from  the  older  houses  to  the 
south.  All  of  the  churches  were  gone  from  down 
town  with  but  a  few  exceptions,  the  most  conspicuous 
of  which  were  the  two  Episcopalian  churches  in  Broad- 
way— Trinity  and  St.  Paul's — the  Roman  Catholic 
Church  of  St.  Peter's  in  Barclay  Street,  St.  George's  in 


The  New  York  that  Macy  First  Saw  9 

Beekman,  the  North  Dutch  in  William,  the  Middle 
Dutch  in  Nassau  and  the  Brick  Presbyterian,  also  in 
Beekman  Street.  This  last,  in  fact,  had  already  been 
sold  for  secular  purposes  and  had  been  abandoned. 
The  congregation  was  building  a  new  house  up  in  the 
fields  at  Fifth  Avenue  and  Thirty-eighth  Street,  a 
step  which  was  regarded  by  its  older  members  as  ex- 
tremely radical  and  precarious,  to  put  it  mildly.  The 
ancient  home  of  the  Middle  Dutch  Reformed  had  also 
gone  for  secular  purposes.  In  it  was  housed  the  New 
York  Post  Office,  already  a  brisk  place,  which  soon  was 
to  outgrow  its  overcrowded  quarters  and  to  expand 
into  its  ugly  citadel  at  the  apex  of  the  City  Hall  Park. 

The  two  great  fires — the  one  in  1833  and  the  other 
in  1 845 — had  removed  from  the  lower  portions  of  the 
city  many  of  their  more  ancient  and  unsightly  struc- 
tures. The  rebuilding  which  had  followed  them  gave 
to  the  growing  town  much  larger  structures  of  a  finer 
and  more  dignified  architecture.  Six  and  seven  story 
buildings  were  quite  common.  This  represented  the 
practical  limitations  of  a  generation  which  knew  not 
elevators,  although  the  new  Fifth  Avenue  Hotel  which 
already  was  being  planned  upon  the  site  of  the  old 
Hippodrome,  at  Broadway  and  Twenty-third  and 
Twenty-fourth  Streets,  was  soon  to  have  the  first  of 
these  contraptions  that  the  world  had  ever  seen. 

Gone,  too,  were  other  old  landmarks  of  downtown — 
some  of  them  in  their  day  distinctly  famous — the  City 
Hall,  the  Union  Hotel,  the  Tontine  Coffee  House,  the 
Bridewell  and  the  reservoir  of  the  Manhattan  Company 
in  Chambers  Street.  The  new  Croton  Works,  with 


IO  The  Romance  of  a  Great  Store 

their  wonderful  aqueduct,  the  High  Bridge,  upon 
which  it  crossed  the  ravine  of  the  Harlem,  and  the 
dual  reservoirs  at  Forty-second  Street  and  at  Eighty- 
sixth,  had  rendered  this  last  structure  obsolete.  The 
State  Prison  had  disappeared  from  its  former  site  at 
the  foot  of  East  Twenty-third  Street.  A  new  group 
of  structures  at  Sing  Sing  had  replaced  the  old  upon 
the  island  of  Manhattan. 

Even  then  the  elegant  New  York  was  moving 
rapidly  uptown.  Union  Square,  still  known,  however, 
to  older  New  Yorkers  as  Union  Place,  was  the  heart 
of  its  life  and  fashion.  It  was  lined  by  the  fine  houses 
of  the  elect  and  two  of  the  most  superb  hotels  of  the 
metropolis,  the  Brevoort  and  the  Union  Square,  while 
the  Clarendon,  which  was  destined  soon  to  house  the 
young  Prince  of  Wales,  stood  but  a  block  away.  At 
Irving  Place  and  Fourteenth  and  Fifteenth  Streets  had 
just  been  completed  the  new  Academy  of  Music.  New 
York  at  last  had  a  real  opera-house,  with  a  stage  and 
fittings  large  enough  and  adequate  to  present  music- 
drama  upon  a  scale  equal  to  that  of  the  larger  European 
capitals.  She  had  plenty  of  theaters,  too:  the  Broad- 
way, the  Bowery,  Laura  Keene's,  Niblo's  Garden,  and 
Wood  &  Christy's  Negro  Minstrels,  chief  amongst 
them.  While  down  at  the  point  where  Chatham  Street 
(now  Park  Row)  debouched  into  Broadway,  Barnum's 
Museum  already  stood,  with  its  gay  bannered  front 
beckoning  eagerly  to  the  countrymen. 

And  how  the  countrymen  did  flock  into  New  York — 
in  those  serene  and  busy  days  before  the  coming  of  a 


The  New  York  that  Macy  First  Saw  1 1 

tragic  war.  New  York  harbor  was  a  busy  place.  For 
not  all  of  them  came  by  the  well-filled  trains  of  the 
three  railroads  that  reached  in  upon  Manhattan  Island. 
There  were  sailing-ships  and  steamboats  a  plenty 
bumping  their  noses  against  the  overcrowded  piers  of 
the  growing  city;  ferries  from  Brooklyn  and  Williams- 
burgh  and  Jersey  City  and  Hoboken  and  Astoria  and 
Staten  Island  j  steamboat  lines  down  the  harbor  to 
Amboy  and  to  Newark  and  to  Elizabethtownj  and  up 
the  Sound  to  Fall  River,  to  Providence  and  to  the 
Connecticut  ports.  But  the  finest  steamers  of  all  plied 
the  Hudson.  There  the  rivalry  was  keenest,  the 
opportunities  for  profit  apparently  the  greatest.  And 
despite  the  fact  that  New  York  was  already  the  port 
of  many  important  ocean  lines — the  Cunard,  the 
Collins,  the  Glasgow,  the  Havre,  the  Hamburg  and 
the  Panama  steamers,  for  the  fast-growing  fame  of  the 
metropolis  of  the  New  World  was  already  attracting 
great  numbers  of  travelers  from  overseas — the  fact 
also  remains  that  when  the  Daniel  Drew,  of  the  Albany 
Night  Line,  was  first  built,  in  1863,  she  exceeded  in 
size  and  in  passenger-carrying  capacity  any  ocean  liner 
plying  in  and  out  of  the  port  of  New  York. 

So  came  the  countrymen  and  the  residents  of  the 
other  smaller  towns  and  cities  of  the  land,  along  with 
many,  many  foreigners,  to  this  new  vortex  of  humanity. 
They  found  their  way,  not  alone  to  the  hotels  of  the 
Union  Square  district,  but  to  such  equally  distinguished 
houses  as  the  Astor,  the  Brevoort,  the  St.  Nicholas,  the 
Metropolitan,  the  New  York.  They  went  to  the 
theaters  and  almost  invariably  they  climbed  the  brown- 


12  The  Romance  of  a  Great  Store 

stone  spire  of  old  Trinity,  in  order  to  drink  in  the  view 
that  it  commanded:  the  wide  sweep  of  busy  city  close 
at  hand,  the  more  distant  ranges  of  the  upper  and 
lower  harbors,  the  North  and  the  East  Rivers,  Long 
Island,  Staten  Island,  New  Jersey  and  the  western 
slopes  of  the  Orange  Mountains.  And  some,  loving 
New  York  and  realizing  the  fair  opportunities  that  it 
offered,  came  to  stay. 

In  among  this  throng  of  folk  who  rushed  into  the 
town  in  1858  there  came — among  those  who  came  to 
stay — Rowland  H.  Macy.  The  partial  success  of  his 
Haverhill  store,  to  an  extent  overbalancing  the  initial 
failure  in  Boston,  had  brought  him  into  the  metropolis 
of  America,  the  city  of  wider,  if  indeed  not  unlimited 
opportunity.  In  those  days  there  were  few  large  stores 
in  New  Yorkj  nothing  to  be  in  the  least  compared  with 
its  great  department  stores  of  today.  One  heard  of  its 
hotels,  its  churches,  its  theaters,  its  banks,  but  very 
little  indeed  of  its  mercantile  establishments.  They 
were,  for  the  most  part,  very  small  and  exceedingly 
individual.  They  were  known  as  shops  and  well  de- 
served that  title.  There  were  a  few  exceptions,  of 
course:  A.  T.  Stewart's — still  on  Broadway  between 
Worth  and  Chambers  Streets — Ridley's,  Lord  & 
Taylor's  and  John  Daniell's  in  Grand  Street  (this  last 
at  Broadway),  McNamee  &  Company's,  Arnold,  Con- 
stable &  Co.,  McCreery's,  Hearn's,  and  one  or  two 
others,  perhaps,  of  particular  distinction. 

It  is  hardly  possible  that  Macy,  as  he  found  his  way 
into  these  larger  establishments,  believed  that  he  might 


The  New  York  that  Macy  First  Saw  13 

ever  in  his  own  enterprise  match  their  elegance  and 
distinction.  It  is  difficult  to  believe  that  in  those  very 
earliest  days  he  had  the  vision  of  a  department  store. 
At  any  rate  the  extremely  modest  establishment  which 
he  opened  at  204  Sixth  Avenue,  between  Thirteenth 
and  Fourteenth  Streets,  in  conjunction  with  his  brother- 
in-law,  Samuel  S.  Houghton,  devoted  itself  at  first, 
and  for  a  long  time  afterward,  exclusively  to  the  sale 
of  fancy  goods.  For  specializing  was  the  fashion  of 
that  day  and  generation  j  John  Daniell  sold  nothing  but 
ribbons  and  trimmings  then;  Aiken  laces,  and  Stewart's 
chiefly  dress-goods. 

Yet  Macy  had  vision.  The  department  store  idea 
must  slowly  have  forced  itself  into  his  mind.  For, 
five  years  later,  we  find  his  small  business,  originally 
on  Sixth  Avenue,  just  a  door  or  two  below  Fourteenth 
Street,  expanding  so  rapidly  that  he  was  forced  to 
secure  more  room  for  it.  And  this  despite  the  fact 
that  not  only  was  he  two  long  blocks  distant  from 
Broadway  but  the  particular  corner  which  he  had 
chosen  for  his  store  was  known  locally  as  unlucky — two 
or  three  other  stores  had  gone  bankrupt  on  it.  Macy 
had  no  intention  of  going  bankrupt.  He  added  to  his 
original  shop  the  store  at  62  West  Fourteenth  Street, 
at  right  angles  to  and  connecting  in  the  rear  with  it,  and 
in  this  he  installed  a  department  of  hats  and  millinery. 
He  was  beginning  to  come  and  come  quickly — this 
country  merchant  to  whom  at  first  New  York  refused 
to  extend  either  recognition  or  credit. 

Now  was  the  complete  department  store  idea  fairly 
launched,  for  the  first  time  in  the  history  of  America, 


14  The  Romance  of  a  Great  Store 

if  not  in  the  entire  world.  Yet,  when  one  came  to 
fair  and  final  analysis,  it  represented  nothing  else  than 
the  country-store  of  the  small  town  or  cross-roads 
greatly  expanded  in  volume.  And  so,  after  all,  it  is 
barely  possible  that  the  canny  New  Englander  may 
have  had  the  germ  of  his  surpassing  idea  implanted  in 
his  mind,  a  full  decade  or  more  before  he  had  the 
opportunity  to  make  use  of  it.  Incidentally,  it  may 
be  set  down  here,  that  Mr.  Macy  in  the  rapidly  recur- 
ring trips  to  Paris  which  he  found  necessary  to  make 
in  the  interest  of  his  business  developed  a  great 
admiration  for  the  Bon  Marche  of  that  city.  He 
studied  its  methods  carefully  and  adopted  them  when- 
ever he  found  the  opportunity. 

From  hats  to  dress-goods — the  addition  of  still 
another  adjoining  store  was  inevitable — came  as  a  fairly 
natural  sequence.  And  one  finds  the  successful  young 
merchant  who  had  had  the  enterprise  and  the  initiative 
to  leave  Broadway — supposedly  the  supreme  shopping 
street  of  the  New  York  of  that  day — laying  in  his 
stocks  of  alpaca,  of  black  bombazine,  of  silks  and 
muslins,  sheetings  and  pillow-cases  and  all  that  with 
these  go.  The  idea  once  born  was  adhered  to.  As  it 
broadened  it  gained  prosperity.  And  as  a  natural 
sequence  there  came  gradually  and  with  a  further 
steady  enlargement  of  the  premises,  jewelry,  toilet- 
goods  and  the  so-called  Vienna  goods.  Toys  were 
added  in  1869,  and  gradually  house-furnishing  goods, 
confectionery,  soda  water,  books  and  stationery,  boys' 
clothing,  ladies'  underwear,  crockery,  glassware,  silver- 


The  New  York  that  Macy  First  Saw  1 5 

ware,  boots  and  shoes,  dress-goods,  dressmaking,  ready- 
to-wear  clothing,  and,  in  due  time,  a  restaurant. 

For  many  years  it  was  the  only  store  in  town  to 
carry  soaps  and  perfumes.  This,  of  itself,  brought  to 
the  store  a  clientele  of  its  own — the  most  beautiful 
women  of  New  York,  among  the  most  notable  of  them, 
Rose  Ey tinge,  the  actress,  who  was  just  then  coming 
to  the  pinnacle  of  her  fame. 

Mr.  Macy,  accompanied  by  his  wife  and  daughter — 
the  latter  of  whom  is  still  alive  at  an  advanced  age — 
took  up  his  residence  at  first  over  the  store  and  then, 
a  little  later,  in  a  small  house  in  West  Twelfth  Street, 
within  easy  walking  distance  of  his  place  of  business. 
From  this  he  afterward  moved  to  a  larger  residence  in 
West  Forty-ninth  Street.  He  was  a  man  of  sturdy 
build,  of  more  than  medium  height  and  thick- set, 
extremely  affable  in  manner.  He  wore  a  heavy  beard, 
and  an  old  employee  of  the  store  was  wont  to  liken 
his  appearance  to  that  of  the  poet,  Longfellow.  His 
tendency  toward  black  cigars  and  to  appearing  in  the 
store  in  his  shirt-sleeves  did  not  heighten  the  resem- 
blance, however. 

He  was  a  man  of  almost  indomitable  will.  Such  a 
quality  was  quite  as  necessary  for  success  in  those  days 
as  in  these.  The  modern  ideas  of  beneficence  and 
generosity  to  the  employee  were  little  dreamed  of  then. 
The  successful  merchant,  like  the  successful  manufac- 
turer or  the  successful  banker,  drove  his  men  and  drove 
them  hard.  Macy  was  no  exception  to  this  rule.  If 
he  had  been,  it  is  doubtful  if  he  would  have  lasted 


1 6  The  Romance  of  a  Great  Store 

long.  For  while  '58  was  a  year  of  seeming  prosperity 
in  New  York  it  also  followed  directly  one  of  the 
notable  panic-years  in  the  financial  history  of  the 
United  States  and  was  soon  to  be  followed  by  four 
years  of  internecine  struggle  in  the  nation — in  which 
its  credit  and  financial  resources  were  to  be  strained  to 
the  utmost. 

It  is  entirely  possible  that  the  record  of  the  Macy 
store  might  not  be  set  down  as  one  of  final  and  over- 
whelming success,  if  it  had  not  been  for  the  driving 
force  of  a  woman,  who  was  brought  into  the  organi- 
zation not  long  after  the  opening  of  the  original 
store  in  lower  Sixth  Avenue.  This  woman,  Margaret 
Getchell,  was  also  born  in  Nantucket.  She  had  been 
a  school-teacher  upon  the  island,  until  the  loss  of  one 
of  her  eyes  forced  her  to  seek  less  confining  work.  She 
drifted  to  New  York  and,  taking  advantage  of  a  girl- 
hood acquaintance  with  Mr.  Macy,  asked  him  for 
employment  in  his  store.  He  knew  her  and  was  glad 
to  take  her  in.  She,  in  turn,  engaged  rooms  in  a  flat 
just  over  a  picture-frame  store,  in  Sixth  Avenue,  across 
from  her  employment,  so  that  she  might  devote  every 
possible  moment  of  her  time,  day  and  night,  to  its 
success. 

So  was  born  a  real  executive — and  in  a  day  when  the 
possibilities  of  women  ever  becoming  business  execu- 
tives were  as  remote  seemingly  as  that  they  might  ever 
fly.  For  decades  after  she  had  gone,  she  left  the 
impress  of  her  remarkable  personality  upon  the  store. 
An  attractive  figure  she  was:  a  small,  slight  woman, 
with  masses  of  glorious  hair  and  a  pert  upturn  to  her 


The  New  York  that  Macy  First  Saw  17 

nose,  while  the  loss  of  her  eye  was  overcome,  from  the 
point  of  view  of  appearance  at  least,  by  the  wearing  of 
an  artificial  one,  which  she  handled  so  cleverly  that 
many  folk  knew  her  for  a  long  time  without  realizing 
her  misfortune. 

At  every  turn,  Margaret  Getchell  was  a  clever 
woman.  Once  when  Mr.  Macy  had  imported  a  won- 
derful mechanical  singing-bird — a  thing  quite  as  un- 
usual in  that  early  day  as  was  the  phonograph  when  it 
came  upon  the  market — and  its  elaborate  mechanism 
had  slipped  out  of  order,  it  was  she,  with  the  aid  of  a 
penknife,  a  screw-driver  and  a  pair  of  pliers — I  pre- 
sume that  she  also  used  a  hair-pin — who  took  it  entirely 
apart  and  put  it  together  again.  And  at  another  time 
she  trained  two  cats  to  permit  themselves  to  be  arrayed 
in  dolPs  clothing  and  to  sleep  for  hours  in  twin-cribs, 
to  the  great  amusement  and  delectation  of  the  visitors 
to  the  store.  Later  she  caused  a  photograph  to  be 
made  of  the  exhibit,  which  was  retailed  in  great  quanti- 
ties to  the  younger  customers.  Miss  Getchell  was 
nothing  if  not  businesslike. 

It  was  her  keen,  commercial  acumen  that  made  her 
alert  in  the  heart  center  of  the  early  store — the  cashier's 
office.  She  tolerated  neither  discrepancies  nor  irregu- 
larities there.  There  it  was  that  the  New  England 
school-ma'm  showed  itself  most  keenly.  Did  a  sales- 
woman overcharge  a  patron  two  dollafs?  And  did  the 
cashier  accept  and  pass  the  check?  Then  the  cashier 
must  pay  the  two  dollars  out  of  her  meagre  pay- 
envelope  on  Saturday  night.  "Overs"  were  treated 
the  same  as  "unders."  It  made  no  difference  that  the 


1 8  The  Romance  of  a  Great  Store 

store  was  already  ahead  two  dollars  on  the  transaction. 
Discipline  was  the  thing.  Discipline  would  keep  that 
sort  of  offense  from  being  repeated  many  times,  and 
Macy's  from  ever  being  given  the  unsavory  reputation 
of  making  a  practice  of  overcharging. 

"Don't  ever  erase  a  figure  or  change  it,  no  matter 
what  seems  to  be  the  logical  reason  in  your  own  mind," 
she  kept  telling  her  cashiers.  "The  very  act  implies 
dishonesty." 

So  does  the  New  England  conscience  ever  lean  back- 
ward. 

Yet  it  is  related  of  this  same  Margaret  Getchell  that 
when  a  little  and  comparatively  friendless  girl  had 
been  admitted  to  the  cashier's  cage — a  decided  inno- 
vation in  those  days — and  had  been  found  in  an 
apparent  peculation  of  three  dollars  and  promptly  dis- 
charged by  Mr.  Macy,  Miss  Getchell  dropped  every- 
thing else  and  went  to  work  on  behalf  of  the  little 
cashier.  Intuitively  she  felt  that  another  of  her  sex 
in  the  cage  had  made  the  theft — a  young  woman  who 
had  come  into  the  store  from  a  prominent  up-state 
family  to  learn  merchandising.  The  up-state  young 
woman  was  fond  of  dress.  Her  dress  demands  far 
exceeded  her  salary.  Of  that  Miss  Getchell  was  sure. 

Yet  intuition  is  one  thing  and  proof  quite  another. 
For  a  fortnight  the  store  manager  worked  upon  her 
surpassing  problem.  She  induced  Macy  to  suspend 
for  a  time  his  order  of  discharge  and  she  kept  putting 
the  women  cashiers  in  relays  in  the  cage,  to  suit  her 
own  fancy  and  her  own  plans.  The  petty  thefts  con- 
tinued. But  not  for  long.  The  plans  worked.  The 


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The  New  York  that  Macy  First  Saw  19 

altered  checks  were  found  to  be  all  in  the  time  of  one 
of  the  cashiers — and  that  was  not  the  one  who  had  been 
discharged.  Miss  Getchell  drove  to  the  home  of  Miss 
Upper  New  York  and  there,  in  the  presence  of  her 
family,  got  both  confession  and  reparation. 

She  was  forever  seeking  new  lines  of  activities  for 
the  store — branching  out  here,  branching  out  there,  and 
turning  most  of  these  new  ventures  into  lines  of 
resounding  profits.  "If  necessary,  we  shall  handle 
everything  except  one,"  she  is  reputed  to  have  said. 
And  upon  being  asked  what  that  one  was,  she  replied 
brusquely,  "Coffins."  Once  she  embarked  Macy  upon 
the  grocery  business — whole  decades  before  the  estab- 
lishment of  the  present  huge  grocery  department — and 
while  eventually  the  store  was  forced  to  drop  for  a 
time  this  line  of  merchandise,  she  succeeded  in  taking 
so  much  business  from  New  York's  then  leading  firm 
of  grocers  that  they  came  to  Macy,  himself,  and  begged 
him  to  drop  the  competition. 

In  the  retailing  world  of  that  day,  tradition  and 
habit  still  governed  and  with  an  iron  hand.  Stores 
opened  early  in  the  morning  and  kept  open  until  late 
in  the  evening,  and  did  this  six  days  of  the  week. 
Their  workers  rose  and  left  their  homes — before  dawn 
in  many  months  of  the  year — and  did  not  return  to 
them  until  well  after  dark.  Yet  they  did  not  complain, 
for  that  was  the  fashion  of  the  times  and  was  recog- 
nized as  such.  Wages  were  as  low  as  the  hours  were 
long.  But  food-costs  also  were  low,  and  rentals  but  a 
tiny  fraction  of  their  present  figure.  The  apartment 


2O  The  Romance  of  a  Great  Store 

house  had  not  yet  come  to  New  York.  It  was  a 
development  set  for  a  full  two  decades  later.  The 
store-workers  lived  in  boarding-houses,  in  small  fur- 
nished rooms  or  with  their  families.  The  greater  part 
of  them  resided  within  walking  distance  of  their 
employment. 

Mr.  Macy  had  all  of  his  fair  share  of  traditional 
New  England  thrift.  One  of  the  favorite  early  anec- 
dotes of  "the  old  man,"  as  his  fellow-workers  were 
prone  to  call  him,  and  with  no  small  show  of  affection, 
concerned  his  refusal  to  permit  shades  to  be  placed 
upon  the  gas-jets  in  the  store,  saying  that  he  paid  for 
the  light  and  so  wanted  the  full  value  for  his  money. 
He  was  skeptical,  at  the  best,  about  innovations. 
Moreover,  necessity  compelled  him  to  keep  close  watch 
upon  the  pennies.  At  one  time  he  reduced  the  weekly 
wages  of  his  cash-girls  from  two  dollars  to  one-dollar- 
and-a-half,  saying  that  the  war  was  over  and  he  could 
no  longer  afford  to  pay  war  wages.  Yet  when  a 
courageous  sales-clerk  went  to  him  and  told  him  that 
she  could  not  possibly  live  any  longer  upon  her  weekly 
wage  of  three  dollars,  he  promptly  raised  it  a  dollar, 
without  argument  or  hesitation.  And  the  following 
week  he  automatically  extended  the  same  increase  to 
every  other  clerk  in  the  store. 

Labor  conditions  in  that  day  were  hard,  indeed. 
The  working  hours,  as  I  have  already  said,  were  long. 
In  regular  times  the  store  hours  were  from  eight  to 
six,  instead  of  from  nine  to  five-thirty,  as  today.  On 
busy  days  the  clerks  worked  an  extra  hour,  putting  the 
stock  in  place,  while  in  the  fortnight  which  preceded 


The  New  York  that  Macy  First  Saw  21 

Christmas  the  store  was  open  evenings — supposedly 
until  ten  o'clock,  as  a  matter  of  fact,  often  until  long 
after  ten,  when  the  workers  were  well  toward  the  point 
of  exhaustion.  Other  conditions  of  their  labor  were 
slightly  better.  There  were  no  seats  in  the  aisles  and 
conversation  between  the  clerks  was  punishable  by  dis- 
charge. They  might  make  their  personal  purchases 
only  on  Friday  mornings,  between  eight  and  nine 
o'clock,  and  they  received  no  discount  whatsoever.  In 
Mr.  Macy's  day  the  only  discounts  ever  given  were  to 
the  New  York  Juvenile  Asylum  in  Thirteenth  Street 
nearby,  which  was  an  institution  peculiarly  close  to  his 
heart. 

There  were  no  lockers  in  the  early  days  of  the  old 
store.  In  one  of  its  upper  floors  several  small  rooms 
were  set  aside  as  a  crude  sort  of  cloak-room  for  the 
employees.  A  few  nails  around  the  walls  sufficed  for 
their  outer  wraps  but  there  were  never  enough  of  these 
nails  to  go  around.  One  of  the  clerks  was  chosen  to 
come  early  and  stay  late  in  order  to  supervise  these 
rooms.  Inasmuch  as  there  was  neither  glory  nor 
remuneration  in  this  task,  it  was  not  eagerly  sought 
after. 

Nevertheless,  here  was  the  enlightened  day  at  hand 
when  women  would  and  did  work  in  stores — not  alone 
in  great  numbers  but  in  a  great  majority;  and  in  many 
cases  to  the  exclusion  of  men.  It  was  one  of  the 
sweeping  economic  changes  that  the  Civil  War  brought 
in  its  train.  When  the  men  must  go  to  fight  in  the 
armies  of  the  North,  women  must  take  their  places — 
for  only  a  little  while  it  seemed  up  to  that  time.  Yet 


22  The  Romance  of  a  Great  Store 

so  well  did  they  do  much  of  men's  work,  that  their 
retention  in  many  of  their  positions  came  as  a  very 
natural  course.  So  while  the  decade  that  preceded  the 
Civil  War  found  few  or  no  professions  open  to 
women — save  those  of  teaching  or  of  domestic  employ- 
ment— the  one  which  followed  it  found  them  coming 
in  increasing  numbers,  into  a  steadily  increasing  num- 
ber and  variety  of  endeavors. 

So  it  was  then  that  the  great  war  of  the  last  century 
brought  women  behind  the  counters  of  the  stores — 
Macy's  was  no  exception  to  the  invasion.  They  came 
to  stay.  And  stay  they  have,  to  this  very  day,  even 
though  most  of  the  New  York  stores  still  retain  men 
to  a  considerable  extent  in  some  of  their  departments — 
notably  those  devoted  to  the  sale  of  furniture,  dress- 
goods  and  boots  and  shoes.  For  some  varieties  of 
stock  the  male  clerk  still  is  the  most  suitable  and  suc- 
cessful sort  of  salesman. 

In  his  store  in  Haverhill,  Mr.  Macy  had  adopted  as 
his  trade-mark  a  rooster  bearing  the  motto  in  his  beak, 
"While  I  live,  I'll  crow."  For  his  nascent  enterprise 
in  New  York,  however,  he  adopted  a  different  and,  to 
him  at  least,  a  far  more  significant  device,  which  to  this 
day  remains  the  symbol  of  the  great  enterprise  which 
still  bears  his  name. 

It  was  a  star,  a  star  of  red,  if  you  will.  And  back 
of  that  simple  symbol  rests  a  story:  It  seems  that  in 
the  days  of  his  youth  when  he  sailed  the  northern  seas 
in  a  whaling  ship  he  had  gradually  acquired  such  pro- 
ficiency that  he  was  made  first  mate  and  then  master. 


The  New  York  that  Macy  First  Saw  23 

It  was  in  the  earlier  capacity,  however,  and  upon  an 
occasion  when  he  was  given  a  trick  at  the  wheel  that 
Macy  found  himself  in  a  thick  fog  off  a  New  England 
port — one  version  of  the  story  says  Boston,  the  other 
New  Bedford.  To  catch  the  familiar  lights  of  the 
harbor  gateways  was  out  of  the  question.  The  cloud 
banks  lay  low  against  the  shore.  Overhead  there  was 
a  rift  or  two,  and  in  one  of  them,  well  ahead  of  the 
vessel's  prow,  there  gleamed  a  brilliant  star. 

For  the  young  skipper  this  was  literally  a  star  of 
hope.  His  quick  wit  made  it  a  guiding  star.  By  it  he 
steered  his  course  and  so  successfully  into  the  safety 
of  the  harbor  that  the  star  became  for  him  thereafter 
the  symbol  of  success.  With  the  strange  insistency 
that  was  inherent  in  the  man,  he  was  wont  to  say  that 
the  failure  of  his  Boston  store  was  due  to  the  fact  that 
he  had  not  there  adopted  the  star  as  his  trade-mark. 
He  made  no  such  mistake  in  his  New  York  enterprise. 
The  star  became  the  forefront  of  his  business.  And 
to  this  day  it  is  a  prominent  feature  of  the  main  facade 
of  the  great  establishment  which  bears  his  name. 

Mr.  Macy  never  lost  his  boyhood  affection  for  the 
sea — the  one  thing  inborn  of  his  ancestral  blood.  It 
is  related  of  him  that  one  morning  on  his  way  to  the 
store  he  found  a  small  silver  anchor  lying  on  the  side- 
walk, picked  it  up,  placed  it  in  his  pocket  and  thereafter 
carried  it  until  the  day  of  his  death,  regarding  it  as  a 
talisman  of  real  value.  There  was  one  souvenir  of  his 
early  connection  of  which  he  was  greatly  ashamed, 
however.  As  a  boy  he  had  permitted  his  shipmates  to 
tattoo  the  backs  of  his  hands.  In  later  years  he  re- 


24  The  Romance  of  a  Great  Store 

gretted  this  exceedingly,  and  developed  a  habit  of 
talking  to  strangers  with  the  palms  of  his  hands  held 
uppermost,  so  that  they  might  not  see  the  tattoo  marks. 

From  the  very  beginning  Macy  adopted  certain  fixed 
and  definite  policies  for  his  business.  These  showed 
not  alone  the  vision  but  the  breadth  and  bigness  of  the 
man.  For  one  of  the  most  important  of  them  he 
decided  that  in  his  business  he  would  have  cash  trans- 
actions only.  This  applied  both  ways — to  the  purchase 
of  his  merchandise  as  well  as  to  its  retail  sale.  It  is  a 
bed-rock  principle  that  has  come  down  to  today  as  a 
foundation  of  the  business  that  he  founded.  It  is 
perhaps  the  one  rule  of  it,  from  which  there  is  no  devi- 
ation, at  any  time  or  under  any  circumstance.  It  is 
related  that  a  full  quarter  of  a  century  after  Macy  had 
first  adopted  this  principle,  one  of  the  then  partners  of 
the  concern  was  approached  by  a  warm  personal  friend, 
a  man  of  high  financial  standing,  who  said  that  he 
wished  to  make  a  rather  elaborate  purchase  that  morn- 
ing, but  not  having  either  cash  or  a  check  handy,  asked 
for  an  exception  to  the  no-credit  rule.  The  partner 
shook  his  head,  smiled,  rather  sadly,  and  said: 

"No,  Mr.  Blank,  I  cannot  do  that,  even  for  you. 
But  I  can  tell  you  what  I  can,  and  shall  do." 

And  so  saying  he  reached  for  his  own  check-book, 
wrote  out  a  personal  voucher  for  two  hundred  dollars, 
stepped  over  to  the  cashier's  office,  had  it  cashed  and 
presented  the  money,  in  crisp  green  bills  to  his  friend. 

"You  can  repay  me,  at  your  convenience,"  was  all 
that  he  said. 


The  New  York  that  Macy  First  Saw  25 

Convinced  that  trust — as  he  insisted  upon  calling 
credit — was  a  millstone  upon  the  neck  of  the  mer- 
chant— let  alone  a  struggling  man  of  thirty-five  who 
previously  had  known  failure — Macy  insisted  upon 
matching  his  purchases  for  any  ensuing  week  close  to 
his  sales  for  the  preceding  one.  He  did  all  his  own 
buying  at  first  j  and  for  a  number  of  years  thereafter 
he  employed  no  professional  buyers  whatsoever.  In 
this  way  he  kept  his  margin  closely  in  hand  and  at  all 
times  well  within  the  range  of  safety.  There  was 
little  of  the  spirit  of  the  gambler  in  him.  It  would 
not  have  sat  well  with  his  Yankee  blood. 

A  second  principle  of  the  store  in  those  early  days 
which  has  come  easily  and  naturally  down  to  these — 
when  it  is  accepted  retailing  principle  everywhere — was 
the  marking  of  the  selling  price  upon  each  and  every 
article.  It  seems  odd  to  think  today  that  the  installing 
of  such  a  fair  and  commonsense  principle  should  once 
have  been  regarded  as  a  stroke  of  daring  initiative  in 
merchandising.  Yet  the  fact  remains  that  in  the  days 
when  Macy's  was  young,  in  the  average  store  one  bar- 
gained and  bargained  constantly.  There  was  no  single 
price  set  upon  any  article.  Even  when  one  went  into 
as  fine  and  showy  a  store  as  New  York  might  boast  one 
bartered.  Caveat  em-ptor,  "Let  the  buyer  beware," 
was  seemingly  the  dominating  retail  motto  of  those 
days. 

But  not  in  Mr.  Macy's.  The  selling  price  went  on 
every  article  displayed  in  the  store  in  those  days  and  in 
such  plain  and  readable  figures  that  any  fairly  educated 
person  might  clearly  understand.  This  principle  alone 


26  The  Romance  of  a  Great  Store 

was  one  of  the  huge  factors  that  went  toward  the  early 
and  immediate  success  of  the  enterprise. 

There  was  still  another  merchandising  idea  born  of 
that  great  and  fertile  New  England  brain  that  needs 
to  be  set  down  at  this  time.  For  many  years  a  notable 
feature  of  the  advertising  of  the  Macy  store  has  been 
in  the  peculiar  shading  of  its  prices — at  forty-nine 
cents  or  ninety-eight,  or  at  $1.98  or  $4.98  or  $9.98 
rather  than  in  the  even  multiples  of  dollars.  A  good 
many  worldly-wise  folk  have  jumped  to  the  quick 
conclusion  that  this  was  due  to  a  desire  on  the  part  of 
the  store  to  make  the  selling  price  of  any  given  article 
seem  a  little  less  than  it  really  was.  As  a  matter  of 
fact  it  was  due  to  nothing  of  the  sort.  With  all  of  his 
respect  for  the  honesty  of  his  sales-force,  the  Yankee 
mind  of  R.  H.  Macy  took  few  chances — even  in  that 
regard.  He  felt  that  in  almost  every  transaction  the 
money  handed  over  by  the  customer  would  be  in  even 
silver  coin  or  bills.  To  give  back  the  change  from  an 
odd-figured  selling-price  the  salesman  or  the  sales- 
woman would  be  compelled  to  do  business  with  the 
cashier  and  so  to  make  a  full  record  of  the  transaction. 
With  the  commodities  in  even  dollars  and  their  larger 
fractions  the  temptation  to  pocket  the  entire  amount 
might  be  present. 

It  required  a  good  deal  of  logic,  or  long-distance 
reasoning,  to  figure  out  such  a  possibility  and  an  almost 
certain  safeguard  against  it.  But  that  was  Macy.  His 
was  not  the  day  of  cash -registers  or  other  checking 
devices.  The  salesman  and  the  saleswoman  in  a  store 
was  still  apt  to  find  himself  or  herself  an  object  of 


The  New  York  that  Macy  First  Saw  27 

suspicion  on  the  part  of  his  or  her  employer.  Business 
ethics  were  still  in  the  making.  A  long  road  in  them 
was  still  to  be  traversed. 

Mr.  Macy's  brother-in-law,  Mr.  Houghton,  did  not 
long  remain  in  partnership  with  him,  but  retired  to 
Boston,  where  he  became  senior  partner  of-  the  house 
of  Houghton  &  Dutton,  which  is  still  in  existence.  For 
a  long  number  of  years  thereafter  Macy  conducted  his 
business  alone.  Its  steadily  increasing  growth,  how- 
ever, the  multiplication  of  its  responsibilities  and 
problems,  and  his  own  oncoming  years  finally  caused 
him  to  admit  to  partnership  on  the  first  day  of  January, 
1877,  two  of  his  oldest  and  most  valued  employees, 
Abiel  T.  LaForge  and  Robert  M.  Valentine.  It  had 
long  been  rumored  in  the  store  that  Miss  GetchelPs 
years  of  faithful  service  were  finally  to  be  rewarded  by 
a  real  partnership  in  it.  But  even  in  1876,  woman's 
place  in  modern  business  had  not  been  firmly  enough 
established  to  permit  so  radical  a  step  by  a  business 
house  of  as  large  ramifications  and  responsibilities  as 
Macy's  had  come  to  be.  Yet  the  point  was  quickly 
overcome — and  in  a  most  unexpected  way.  Early  in 
1 876  Miss  Getchell  became  Mr.  LaForge's  wife.  And 
so,  in  a  most  active  and  interested  way,  she  gained  at 
the  end  a  real  financial  interest  in  the  profitable  busi- 
ness, in  the  upbuilding  of  which  she  had  been  so  large 
a  factor. 

Mr.  LaForge  had  been  a  major  in  the  Northern 
Army  during  the  Civil  War;  in  fact  it  was  there  that 
he  had  contracted  the  tuberculosis  which  was  to  cause 


28  The  Romance  of  a  Great  Store 

his  early  demise.  He  had  come  into  the  store  in  the 
middle  of  the  'seventies  as  one  of  its  first  professional 
buyers — being  a  specialist  in  laces — and  had  developed 
real  executive  ability.  He  had  great  affection  for 
things  military.  And  when  Mr.  Macy  told  him  of 
the  uniformed  attendants  of  his  beloved  Bon  Marche, 
LaForge  promptly  proceeded  to  place  the  entire  sales- 
force  of  Macy's  in  uniform.  Neat  uniforms  they 
were,  too:  of  a  bluish-grey  cadet  cloth,  and  with  stiff 
upstanding  collars  of  a  much  darker  blue  upon  the 
points  of  which  were  interwoven  the  familiar  device 
of  the  bright  red  star.  The  Macy  uniforms  did  not 
long  remain,  however.  New  York  is  not  Paris.  And 
in  that  day,  when  uniforms  in  general  were  looked 
upon  as  something  quite  foreign  to  the  idea  of  the 
republic,  American  labor  was  particularly  averse  to 
them. 

His  important  partnership  step  taken,  Mr.  Macy 
began  to  lay  down  his  responsibilities.  Despite  his 
great  fame  and  vigorous  constitution  his  health  had 
begun  to  fail  under  the  multiplicity  of  duties.  Again 
he  turned  toward  the  sea.  He  embarked  upon  a  long 
voyage  to  Europe  j  in  which  he  was  to  combine  both 
business  and  pleasure.  From  that  voyage  he  never 
returned.  His  health  sank  rapidly  and  he  died  in 
Paris,  on  the  twenty-ninth  day  of  March,  1877. 

Two  days  later  in  New  York,  Mr.  LaForge  and 
Mr.  Valentine  formed  a  partnership,  Mr.  LaForge, 
although  the  younger  of  the  two  men,  becoming  the 
senior  member  of  the  firm.  It  was  provided  in  the 


The  New  York  that  Macy  First  Saw  29 

co-partnership  papers  that  the  business  should  be  con- 
tinued under  the  name  of  R.  H.  Macy  &  Co.,  until 
January  i,  1879$  and  thereafter  under  the  new  firm 
name  of  LaForge  and  Valentine.  However,  Mr. 
LaForge's  death  in  1878,  followed  a  year  later  by  that 
of  his  wife,  prevented  this  scheme  from  being  car- 
ried out.  The  question  of  changing  the  name  of  a 
well-established  business — now  come  to  be  one  of  the 
great  enterprises  of  the  city  of  New  York — was  never 
again  brought  forward.  The  name  of  Macy  had 
attained  far  too  fine  a  trade  value  to  be  easily  dropped, 
even  if  sentiment  had  not  come  into  the  reckoning. 
And  sentiment  still  ruled  the  big  retail  house  in  lower 
Sixth  Avenue,  sentiment  demanded  that  the  name  of 
one  of  New  York's  greatest  merchant  princes  should  be 
henceforth  perpetuated  in  the  business  which  he  had  so 
solidly  founded.  And  so  that  name  continues — in 
growing  strength  and  prosperity. 


III.     Fourteenth  Street  Days 

BY  1883  tne  Macy  store  had  rounded  out  its  first 
quarter  century  of  existence.  The  big,  comfort- 
able, homely  group  of  red  brick  buildings  on  Sixth 
Avenue  from  Thirteenth  to  Fourteenth  Streets  had 
come  to  be  as  much  a  real  landmark  of  New  York  as 
the  Grand  Central  Depot,  Grace  Church,  Booth's 
Theater,  the  Metropolitan  Opera  House  or  the  equally 
new  Casino  Theater  in  upper  Broadway.  Its  founder 
had  been  dead  for  six  years.  But  the  business  marched 
steadily  on — growing  steadily  both  in  its  scope  and  in 
its  volume.  It  already  was  among  the  first,  if  not  the 
very  first  in  New  York,  in  the  variety  and  the  magni- 
tude of  its  operations.  It  employed  more  than  fifteen 
hundred  men  and  women,  a  great  growth  since  1870 
when  an  early  payroll  of  the  store  had  shown  but  one 
hundred  on  its  employment  list. 

Other  stores  had  followed  closely  upon  the  heels  of 
Macy's.  Stewart's  had  moved  up  Broadway  from 
Chambers  Street  to  its  wonderful  square  iron  emporium 
between  Ninth  and  Tenth  Streets,  where,  after  the 
death  of  the  man  who  had  established  it,  it  enjoyed 
varying  success  for  a  long  time  until  its  final  resusci- 
tation by  that  great  Philadelphia  merchant,  John 
Wanamaker.  Benjamin  Altman  had  moved  his  store 
from  its  original  location  on  Third  Avenue  to  Sixth 

31" 


^ 2  The  Romance  of  a  Great  Store 

Avenue  and  Eighteenth  Street,  Koch  was  at  Nineteenth 
Street,  but  Ehrich  was  still  over  on  Eighth  Avenue. 
None  of  these  had  been  an  important  merchant  in  the 
beginning.  But  all  of  them,  by  1883,  were  beginning 
to  come  into  their  own.  The  Sixth  Avenue  shopping 
district  of  the  'eighties  and  the  'nineties  was  being  born. 
Mr.  Macy's  vision  of  more  than  twenty-five  years 
years  before  was  being  abundantly  justified.  The  new 
elevated  railroad,  which  formed  the  backbone  of  Sixth 
Avenue  and  which  had  been  completed  about  a  decade 
before,  all  the  way  from  South  Ferry  to  One  Hundred 
and  Fifty-fifth  Street,  had  proved  a  mighty  factor  in 
bringing  shoppers  into  it.  Mr.  Macy  in  1858  might 
not  have  foreseen  the  coming  of  this  remarkable  system 
of  rapid  transit — the  first  of  its  kind  in  any  large  city 
of  the  world.  But  he  foresaw  the  coming  of  both 
Sixth  Avenue  and  Fourteenth  Street.  There  is  no 
doubt  of  that.  He  had  a  habit  of  reiterating  his 
prophecy  to  all  with  whom  he  came  in  contact. 

The  prophecy  came  to  pass.  Union  Square  no  longer 
was  surrounded  by  fine  residences.  Trade  had  invaded 
it,  successfully.  Tiffany's,  Brentano's,  The  Century's 
fine  publishing  house  had  come  to  replace  the  homes  of 
the  old  time  New  Yorkers.  So,  too,  had  Fourteenth 
Street  been  transformed.  Delmonico's  was  still  at 
one  of  its  Fifth  Avenue  corners  and  back  of  it  stood, 
and  still  stands,  the  Van  Buren  residence,  a  sort  of  Last 
of  the  Mohicans  in  brick  and  stone  and  timber  and 
plaster.  All  the  rest  was  business  j  high-grade  busi- 
ness, if  you  please,  and  Macy's  stood  in  the  very  heart 
of  it. 


Fourteenth  Street  Days  33 

We  saw,  in  a  preceding  chapter,  how  just  before  the 
passing  of  Mr.  Macy  he  had  taken  into  partnership 
Mr.  LaForge  and  Mr.  Valentine.  Mr.  LaForge,  as 
we  have  just  seen,  lived  hardly  a  year  after  Mr.  Macy's 
death  in  Paris,  and  Mr.  Valentine  died  less  than  a 
twelvemonth  later — on  February  15,  1879.  Yet  the 
force  and  impress  of  both  of  these  men  remained  with 
the  organization  for  a  long  time  after  their  going. 
Miss  Prunty,  one  of  the  older  members  of  it,  still 
remembers  as  one  of  her  earliest  recollections,  seeing 
Mr.  LaForge  taking  groups  of  the  cash-girls  out  to 
supper  during  the  racking  holiday  season.  The  little 
girls  were  duly  grateful.  Theirs  was  a  drab  existence, 
at  the  bestj  long  hours  and  wearying  ones.  A  type 
that  has  quite  passed  out  of  existence — in  these  days  of 
automatic  carriers — that  old-time  cash  girl  in  the  big 
store,  with  her  red-checked  gingham  frock  and  her  hair 
in  pig-tails,  which  had  a  fashion  of  sticking  straight  out 
from  her  small  head.  Lunch  in  a  small  tin  pail  and  a 
vast  ambition,  which  led  many  and  many  a  one  of  them 
into  positions  of  real  trust  and  responsibility. 

The  most  of  them  continued  in  the  business  of 
merchandising.  They  rose  rapidly  to  be  saleswomen, 
buyers  and  department  managers — not  alone  in  Macy'sj 
but  in  the  other  great  stores  of  the  city.  A  Macy 
training  became  recognized  as  a  business  schooling  of 
the  greatest  value.  While  at  least  one  of  these  Macy 
graduates — Carrie  DeMar — came  to  be  an  actress  of 
nation-wide  reputation,  a  comedienne  of  real  merit. 

There  were  times  when  the  existence  of  these  smart, 
pert  little  girls  grew  less  drab.  One  of  them  told  me 


34  The  Romance  of  a  Great  Store 

not  so  long  ago  of  the  entente  cordiale  which  she  had 

upbuilded  between  Mr.  S and  herself  j  nearly  fifty 

years  ago. 

"Mr.  S was  the  only  floorwalker  that  the  store 

possessed  in  those  days,"  said  she.  "Mr.  Macy  had 
been  much  impressed  by  his  fine  appearance  and  had 
created  the  post  for  him.  On  duty,  he  seemed  a  most 
solemn  man.  That  was  a  part  of  his  work.  Behind 
it  all  he  was  most  human,  howeverj  and  sometimes  on 
a  hot  day  in  midsummer  he  would  begin  to  think  of 
the  cooling  lager  that  flowed  at  The  Grapevine,  a  few 
blocks  down  the  avenue.  That  settled  it.  He  would 
have  to  slip  down  there  for  five  minutes.  And  slip 
down  he  did,  while  I  stood  guard  at  the  Thirteenth 
Street  door.  I  felt  that  Miss  GetchelPs  far-seeing 
eye  was  forever  upon  us  or  that  Mr.  Macy  might  turn 
up  quite  unexpectedly. 

"In  return  for  all  this,  Mr.  S would  occasionally 

stand  guard  while  I  would  slip  over  to  John  Huyler's 
bakery  at  Eighth  Avenue  and  Fourteenth  Street — 
sometimes  to  get  one  of  his  wonderful  pies,  and  other 
times  to  buy  the  lovely  new  candies  upon  which  he  was 

beginning  to  experiment.  We  were  great  pals — S 

and  I." 

Nowadays  in  the  great  department  stores  they  order 
this  entire  business  of  collecting  both  cash  and  packages 
in  a  far  better  fashion.  The  merchant  of  today  has 
a  variety  of  wondrous  mechanical  contraptions — not 
only  cash-carriers  but  cash-registers — which  do  the 
work  they  once  did,  much  more  rapidly  and  efficiently. 


/:&-     .;  ••Zi-.-.af^.        ?    .. 

M     __  _J'S,-£*    -rS.'.---'-.;;^;  '- 


THE  FOURTEENTH  STREET  STORE  OF  OTHER  DAYS 

By  the  early  'seventies  Macy's  had  absorbed  the  entire  southeastern 

corners  of    1 4th  Street  and  6th  Avenue,  and  had  come  to 

be  a  fixture  of  New  York 


Fourteenth  Street  Days  35 

Even  in  those  long  ago  days  of  the  'eighties  the  Macy 
store  was  beginning  to  install  pneumatic  tubes  for 
carrying  the  money  from  the  saleswomen  at  the 
counters  to  the  high-set  booths  of  the  head  cashiers, 
who  seemingly  had  come  to  regard  it  as  a  mere  com- 
modity, to  be  regarded  in  as  fully  impersonal  a  fashion 
as  boots  or  shoes  or  sugar  or  broom-sticks.  Put  that 
down  as  progress  for  the  'eighties. 

The  Macy  store  prided  itself  during  that  second 
generation,  as  now,  upon  its  willingness  to  take  up 
innovations,  particularly  when  they  showed  themselves 
as  possessing  at  least  a  degree  of  real  worth.  Mr. 
Macy,  with  his  old  fashioned  prejudices  against  inno- 
vations of  any  sort,  was  gone.  His  successors  took  a 
radically  different  position  in  regard  to  them.  Here 
was  the  electric-light — that  brand-new  thing  which  this 
young  man  Tom  Edison  over  at  Menlo  Park  was 
developing  so  rapidly.  It  was  new.  It  had  been  well 
advertised  j  particularly  well  advertised  for  that  day 
and  generation.  How  it  drew  folk,  to  gaze  admiringly 
upon  its  hissing  brilliancy!  Ergo!  The  Macy  store 
must  have  an  electric  light.  And  so  in  the  late  autumn 
days  of  1878  one  of  the  very  first  arc  lamps  to  be  dis- 
played in  New  York  was  hung  outside  the  Fourteenth 
Street  front  of  the  store  and  attracted  many  crowds. 
It  was  hardly  less  than  a  sensation. 

In  the  following  autumn  arc  lamps  were  placed 
throughout  all  the  retail  selling  portions  of  the  store. 
Of  course,  they  were  not  very  dependable.  Most  folk 
those  days  thought  that  they  would  never  so  become. 
The  store's  real  reliance  was  upon  its  gas-lighting; 


36  The  Romance  of  a  Great  Store 

nice,  reliable  old  gas.  You  could  depend  upon  it. 
The  new  system  was  still  erratic.  So  figured  the  mind 
of  the  'eighties. 

Soon  after  the  first  electric  lamps,  the  store's  first 
telephone  was  installed.  It,  too,  was  a  great  novelty, 
and  the  customers  of  the  establishment  developed  a 
habit  of  calling  up  their  friends,  just  so  that  they  could 
say  they  had  used  it.  Eventually  the  convenience  of 
the  device  became  so  apparent  that  folk  stood  in  queues 
awaiting  their  turn  to  use  it,  and  the  telephone  com- 
pany requested  Macy's  to  take  it  out  or  at  least  to 
discontinue  the  practice  of  using  it  so  freely. 

In  that  day  there  were  no  elevators  nor  for  a  con- 
siderable time  thereafter.  All  the  store's  selling  was 
at  first,  and  for  a  long  time  thereafter,  confined  to  its 
basement  and  to  its  main-floor.  Gradually  it  began 
to  encroach  upon  small  portions  of  the  second  story. 
This  afforded  fairly  generous  selling  space j  for  it 
must  be  remembered  that  the  establishment  not  only 
filled  the  entire  east  side  of  Sixth  Avenue  from  Thir- 
teenth Street  to  Fourteenth  Street  but  extended  back 
upon  each  of  them  for  more  than  one  hundred  and 
fifty  feet.  Moreover  it  was  beginning  slowly  to 
acquire  disconnected  buildings  in  the  surrounding  terri- 
tory j  generally  for  the  purpose  of  manufacturing  cer- 
tain lines  of  merchandise — a  practice  which  it  has 
almost  entirely  discontinued  in  these  later  years.  Then 
it  still  made  certain  things  that  it  wished  fashioned  along 
the  lines  which  its  clientele  still  demanded.  And  even 
some  of  the  upper  floors  of  the  older  buildings  that 
formed  the  main  store  group  were  partly  given  over 


Fourteenth  Street  Days  37 

to  the  making  of  clothing  j  of  underwear  j  and  men's 
shirts  and  collars  in  particular. 

It  was  after  1882,  according  to  the  memory  of  Mr. 
James  E.  Murphy,  a  salesman  in  the  black  silk  depart- 
ment, who  came  to  the  store  in  that  memorable  year, 
that  the  first  elevator  was  installed  in  the  store.  Up 
to  that  time,  as  we  have  just  seen,  there  had  been  no 
necessity  whatsoever  for  such  a  machine.  But  the 
steadily  growing  business  of  the  store — there  really 
seemed  to  be  no  way  of  holding  Macy's  back — made 
it  necessary  to  use  upper  floors  of  the  original  building 
for  retailing  and  more  and  more  to  crowd  the  manu- 
facturing and  other  departments  into  outside  structures. 

So  Macy's  progressed.  It  kept  its  selling  methods 
as  well  as  its  stock,  not  only  abreast  of  the  times,  but 
a  little  ahead  of  them.  Miss  Fallen,  who  was  in  the 
shoe  department  of  those  days  of  the  'eighties,  recalls 
that  up  to  that  time  the  shoes  had  been  kept  in  large 
chiffoniers — the  sizes  "2^"  to  "3/-4"  in  one  drawer, 
"4  "  to  "5"  in  the  next,  and  so  on.  This  meant  that 
if  a  clerk  was  looking  for  a  certain  specified  width — 
say  "D"  or  "Double  A" — she  must  rummage  through 
the  entire  drawer  until  she  came  to  a  pair  which  had 
the  required  size  neatly  marked  upon  its  lining.  The 
mating  of  the  shoes  was  accomplished  by  boring  small 
awl  holes  in  their  backs  and  tying  them  neatly 
together.  There  was  no  repair  shop  in  the  shoe 
department  of  that  day — merely  an  aged  shoemaker 
who  lived  in  a  basement  across  Thirteenth  Street  and 
to  whom  shoes  for  repair  were  despatched  almost  as 
rapidly  as  they  came  into  the  store. 


4317SG 


38  The  Romance  of  a  Great  Store 

These  methods  seem  crude  today.  But,  even  in 
1883,  they  were  in  full  keeping  with  the  times. 
Merchandising  was  still  in  its  swaddling  clothes  j  the 
real  science  of  salesmanship,  a  thing  unknown.  Yet 
men  were  groping  through;  and  some  of  these  men 
were  in  Macy's.  You  might  take  as  such  a  man 
C.  B.  Webster,  who  came  to  the  forefront  of  the  busi- 
ness, soon  after  the  deaths  of  Macy,  LaForge  and 
Valentine  at  the  end  of  its  second  decade.  In  fact,  his 
actual  admission  to  the  partnership  preceded  Mr. 
Valentine's  death  by  a  few  months.  A  while  later  he 
married  Mr.  Valentine's  widow.  And  when  the  last 
of  the  old  partners  was  gone  his  was  the  steering  hand 
upon  the  brisk  and  busy  ship. 

To  help  him  in  his  work  he  brought  to  his  right 
hand  Jerome  B.  Wheeler,  who  was  admitted  as  a  full 
partner  April  i,  1879,  and  who  so  continued  until  his 
complete  retirement  from  business,  December  31,  1887. 
Mr.  Webster  continued  with  the  house  for  a  consider- 
ably longer  time,  maintaining  his  active  partner- 
ship until  1896  when  he  sold  his  interest  in  the  busi- 
ness to  his  partners.  He  continued,  however,  to  retain 
his  private  office  in  the  Macy  store,  coming  north  with 
it  from  Fourteenth  Street  to  Thirty-fourth  in  1902, 
and,  until  his  death  four  or  five  years  ago,  staying  close 
beside  the  enterprise  in  which  he  had  been  so  large  a 
creative  factor. 

Webster  and  Wheeler  are,  tljen,  the  names  most 
prominently  connected  with  the  second  era  of  the 
store's  growth  and  activity.  They  were  bound  to  the 
founder  of  the  house  by  blood-ties  and  by  marriage. 


Fourteenth  Street  Days  39 

Mr.  Webster's  father — Josiah  Locke  Webster,  a  mer- 
chant of  Providence,  R.  I. — and  Mr.  Macy  were  first 
cousins,  their  mothers  having  been  sisters.  The  elder 
Webster  and  Rowland  H.  Macy  were,  in  fact,  the 
warmest  of  friends  and  so  the  proffer  by  the  original 
proprietor  of  the  store  of  an  opening  to  his  friend's 
son,  came  almost  as  a  matter  of  course.  Its  educational 
value  alone  was  enormous.  Young  Webster  accepted. 
He  joined  the  organization  in  1 876  and  a  year  later  was 
made  one  of  its  buyers.  His  worth  quickly  began  to 
assert  itself.  And  within  another  twelvemonth  he  had 
abandoned  all  idea  of  returning  to  his  father's  store  in 
Providence  and  entered  upon  a  partnership  in  the  Macy 
business. 

Many  of  the  older  employees  of  the  store  still  re- 
member him  distinctly.  He  was  a  tall  man,  stately, 
conservative  in  speech  and  in  manner — your  typical 
successful  man  of  business  of  that  time  and  generation. 
Yet  these  very  Macy  people  will  tell  you  today  that 
while  his  dignity  awed,  it  did  not  repress.  For  with  it 
went  a  kindliness  of  manner  and  of  purpose.  Nor  was 
he — as  some  of  them  were  then  inclined  to  believe — 
devoid  of  any  sense  of  humor.  Mr.  James  Woods, 
who  is  assistant  superintendent  of  delivery  in  the  store 
today  and  who  has  been  with  it  for  forty-eight  years, 
recalls  many  and  many  a  battle  royal  with  "C.  B.  W." 
as  he  still  calls  his  old  associate  and  chief,  which  they 
had  together  as  they  worked  in  the  delivery  rooms  of 
the  old  Fourteenth  Street  store,  hurling  packages  at  one 
another  and  then  following  up  with  smart  fisticuffs. 

"In  those  early  days,"  adds  George  L.  Hammond, 


4O  The  Romance  of  a  Great  Store 

who  came  to  the  store  in  1886  and  who  is  now  in  its 
woolen  dress-goods  department,  "I  found  Mr.  Webster 
a  most  kindly  man,  even  though  taciturn.  For  instance, 
one  day  Mr.  Isidor  Straus  came  up  to  the  counter  with 
a  man  whom  he  had  met  upon  the  floor.  They  stood 
talking  together.  Mr.  Straus  told  the  other  gentleman 
that  he  had  recently  met  a  Mr.  Cebalos,  known  at  that 
time  as  the  Cuban  Sugar  King,  and  that  Mr.  Cebalos 
had  spoken  to  him  of  having  met  such  a  fine  gentleman, 
an  American,  in  France  j  that  this  gentleman  was  evi- 
dently a  man  of  education  and  large  means  and  had 
said  that  he  was  in  business  in  New  York.  Mr.  Cebalos 
asked  Mr.  Straus  if  he  had  ever  known  his  chance 
acquaintance  in  Paris — he  was  a  Mr.  Webster, 
Mr.  C.  B.  Webster.  To  which  Mr.  Straus  instantly 
replied:  cOf  course  I  know  him.  He  is  the  senior 
member  of  our  firm.'  Mr.  Cebalos  answered:  'What, 
the  senior  member  of  the  firm  of  R.  H.  Macy  & 
Co.  ?  Why,  he  never  told  me  that ! ' " 

So  much  for  old-fashioned  modesty  and  conservatism. 

The  habit  of  reticence  enclosed  many  of  these  older 
executives  of  Macy's.  They  were  silent  oft-times 
because  they  could  not  forget  their  vast  responsibili- 
ties— even  when  they  were  away  from  the  store.  It  is 
told  of  one  of  them  that  once  in  the  middle  of  the 
performance  in  an  uptown  theater  the  thought  flashed 
over  him  that  he  had  neglected  to  close  his  safe — a 
duty  which  was  never  relegated  to  any  subordinate. 
He  arose  at  once  from  his  seat  and  hurried  down  to  the 
Store,  brought  the  night  watchman  to  the  doors  and 


strode  quickly  to  the  private  office:  only  to  find  the 
stout  doors  of  its  great  strong-box  firmly  fastened. 
The  idea  that  he  had  neglected  his  duty  was  a  nervous 
obsession.  His  was  not  the  training  nor  the  mentality 
that  ever  neglected  duty. 

Upon  another  occasion  another  partner  (Mr. 
Wheeler)  worried  himself  almost  into  a  nervous  break- 
down for  fear  that  there  would  not  be  enough  pennies 
for  the  cashier's  cage  during  the  forthcoming  holiday 
season.  Mr.  Macy's  odd-price  plan  was  something 
of  a  drain  upon  the  copper  coin  market  of  New 
York.  And  at  this  particular  time,  the  local  shortage 
being  acute,  Mr.  Wheeler  took  a  night  train  and  hur- 
ried to  Washington,  to  see  the  Secretary  of  the 
Treasury.  Late  the  next  evening  he  returned  to  New 
York  and  went  to  the  house  of  Miss  Abbie  Golden,  his 
head  cashier,  at  midnight,  just  to  tell  her  that  he  had 
succeeded  in  getting  an  order  upon  the  director  of  the 
Philadelphia  Mint  for  $10,000  in  brand-new  copper 
pennies.  After  which  he  went  home,  to  a  well-earned 
rest. 

Although  Mr.  Wheeler's  connection  with  the  store 
was  for  a  much  shorter  period,  he  left  upon  it,  at  the 
end  of  its  second  era,  much  of  the  impress  of  his  own 
personality.  Like  both  Webster  and  Valentine,  he  also 
was  indirectly  related  to  R.  H.  Macy,  having  married 
Mr.  Macy's  niece,  Miss  Valentine.  In  appearance  and 
in  manner  he  was  the  direct  antithesis  of  his  partner, 
Webster.  In  the  language  of  today  he  was  a  "mixer." 
Affable,  direct,  approachable,  men  liked  him  and  came 


42  The  Romance  of  a  Great  Store 

to  him  freely.  The  employees  of  the  store  poured 
their  woes  into  his  earsj  and  never  in  vain.  He  stood 
ready  to  help  them,  in  every  possible  way.  And  they, 
knowing  this,  came  frequently  to  him. 

Mr.  Wheeler  left  the  store  and  organization  in  1887, 
selling  his  interest  in  the  enterprise  to  Messrs.  Isidor 
and  Nathan  Straus — of  whom  much  more  in  a  very 
few  moments.  He  became  tremendously  interested 
in  the  development  of  Colorado  and,  upon  going  out 
there  in  1888,  built  up  a  chain  of  stores,  banks  and 
mines.  He  still  lives  in  the  land  of  his  adoption. 

One  of  Mr.  Wheeler's  keenest  interests  in  the  store 
was  in  its  toy  department.  In  this  he  followed  closely 
Macy's  own  trend  of  thought  and  desire.  For  Macy's 
had  already  become,  beyond  a  doubt,  the  toy-store  of 
New  York  City.  Starting  eleven  years  after  the 
foundation  of  the  original  store,  this  one  department 
had  so  grown  and  expanded  as  annually  to  demand  and 
receive  the  entire  selling-space  of  the  main  floor.  Each 
year,  about  the  fifteenth  of  December,  all  other  stocks 
would  be  cleared  from  shelves  and  counters,  the  willow- 
feathers,  the  fans  and  the  fine  laces  would  disappear 
from  the  little  glass  cases  beside  the  main  Fourteenth 
Street  doors  and  in  their  places  would  come  the  toys — 
a  goodly  company  in  all,  but  strange — dolls,  engines, 
blocks,  mechanical  devices,  books. 

And  then,  to  the  doors  of  the  great  red-brick  em- 
porium in  Sixth  Avenue  would  come  New  York  Jr. 
He  and  she  came  afoot  and  in  carriages,  upon  horse- 
cars  of  the  surface  railways  and  upon  the  steam-cars  of 


Fourteenth  Street  Days  43 

the  elevated,  and  before  they  entered  stood  for  a 
moment  at  the  great  glass  windows  that  completely 
surrounded  the  place.  For  there  was  spread  to  view 
a  pantomime  of  the  most  enchanting  sort.  No  theater 
might  equal  the  annual  Christmas  window  display  of 
Macy's.  No  theater  might  even  dream  of  creating 
such  a  vast  and  overwhelming  spectacle.  The  Hippo- 
drome of  today  was  still  nearly  thirty  years  into  the 
future. 

The  responsibilities  of  this  vast  undertaking  alone 
were  all  but  overwhelming.  The  twenty-fifth  of 
December  was  barely  passed,  the  store  hardly  cleaned 
of  all  the  debris  and  confusion  that  it  had  brought, 
before  plans  for  another  Christmas  were  actively  under 
way;  Miss  Bowyer,  who  specialized  in  the  window  dis- 
play, taking  Mr.  Wheeler  up  to  the  wax-figure  experts 
of  Eden  Musee  in  Twenty-third  Street  to  order  the 
saints  and  sinners  and  famous  folk  generally  who  came 
to  the  window  annually  at  the  end  of  December.  One 
of  the  present  executives  of  Macy's  can  remember 
being  privileged,  as  a  small  boy,  to  go  behind  the  scenes 
of  the  window  pantomime.  There  he  saw  jt,  not  in 
its  beauty  of  form  and  color  and  light,  but  as  a  be- 
wildering perplexity  of  mechanisms — belts  and  pulleys 
and  levers  and  cams — an  enterprise  of  no  little 
magnitude. 

While  Miss  Bowyer  and  her  assistants  were  busy 
laying  the  first  of  the  plans  for  another  window  dis- 
play, Mr.  Macy  was  off  for  Europe  seeking  a  fresh 
supply  of  toys  and  novelties  for  New  York  Jr.'s  own 
annual  festival.  Once  in  a  while  he  touched  a  high 


44  The  Romance  of  a  Great  Store 

level  of  novelty,  such  as  the  securing  of  the  mechanical 
bird — which  a  moment  ago  we  saw  Margaret  Getchell 
taking  all  to  pieces  and  then  placing  the  pieces  together 
again,  with  all  the  celerity  and  precision  of  a  Yankee 
mechanic.  The  mechanical  bird  appealed  particularly 
to  Mr.  Macy's  friend,  Mr.  Phineas  T.  Barnum.  Mr. 
Barnum  came  often  to  the  store  in  Fourteenth  Street 
to  gaze  upon  it  and  to  listen  to  it.  Perhaps  he 
regretted  that  he  had  let  so  valuable  an  advertising 
feature  slip  out  of  the  hands  of  his  museum. 

For  Mr.  Macy's  chief  reason  in  importing  a  toy  so 
rare  and  so  expensive  as  to  bring  it  far  beyond  the  hands 
of  any  ordinary  child  was  to  create  sensation — and  so 
to  gain  advertising  thereby.  The  merchant  from  out 
of  New  England  was  nothing  if  not  a  born  advertiser. 
While  his  competitors  were  quite  content  with  small 
and  stilted  announcements  in  the  public  prints  as  to  the 
extent  and  variety  of  their  wares,  Macy  splurged.  He 
took  "big  space" — big  at  least  for  that  day  and  gen- 
eration. And  he  did  not  hesitate  to  let  printer's  ink 
carry  the  fame  of  his  emporium  far  and  wide — a 
sound  business  principle  which  has  prevailed  in  it  from 
that  day  to  this. 

But  the  toy  season  was  never  passed  without  its 
doubts  and  worries.  An  older  employee  of  the  store 
can  still  remember  a  most  memorable  year  when  it 
rained  for  a  solid  week  after  the  toy  season  had  opened 
and  the  bombazines  and  the  muslins  had  been  put  away 
for  the  building-blocks  and  the  hobby-horse.  No  one 
came  to  the  store  for  seven  long  days.  Mr.  Macy  was 
greatly  distressed,  He  walked  up  one  aisle  and  down 


Fourteenth  Street  Days  45 

another,  stroking  his  long  silky  beard  and  saying  that 
he  was  utterly  ruined,  and  would  have  to  close  his  store 
forthwith.  But  on  the  eighth  day  the  sun  came  out,  a 
season  of  fine  crisp  December  weather  arrived  and  the 
store  was  thronged  with  holiday  shoppers.  A  fort- 
night's buying  was  accomplished  in  the  passing  of  a 
single  week  and  the  situation  completely  saved. 


IV.     The  Coming  of  Isidor  and 
Nathan  Straus 

DURING  the  era  in  which  Webster  and  Wheeler 
controlled  it,  the  Macy  store  may  be  fairly  said 
to  have  been  in  a  state  of  hiatus.  The  driving  force 
of  its  founders — Rowland  Macy,  LaForge  and  his  wife 
and  Valentine — was  somewhat  spent.  And  nothing 
had  come  to  replace  it.  The  store  went  ahead,  of 
course — Webster  and  Wheeler  were  both  hard  workers 
and  well-schooled — but  keen  observers  noticed  that  it 
traveled  quite  largely  upon  the  impetus  and  momentum 
which  it  had  derived  from  its  founders.  New  minds 
and  hands  to  direct,  new  arms  to  strike  and  to  strike 
strongly  were  needed  and  greatly  needed.  These  new 
minds  and  hands  and  arms  it  was  about  to  receive.  But 
before  we  come  to  their  consideration  we  shall  turn 
back  the  calendar — for  nearly  forty  years. 

It  was  in  1848  that  the  German  Revolution  drove 
out  from  the  Fatherland  and  into  other  countries  great 
numbers  of  men  and  women.  The  United  States 
received  its  fair  share  of  these  j  the  most  of  them  young 
men,  impetuous,  enterprising,  idealistic.  The  late 
Carl  Schurz  was  a  fair  representative  of  this  type. 
About  him  were  grouped  in  turn  a  small  group  of  men, 
who  might  be  regarded  fairly  as  the  most  energetic  and 

47 


48  The  Romance  of  a  Great  Store 

successful  of  the  expatriates.  In  this  group  one  of  the 
most  distinctive  was  one  Lazarus  Straus,  who  had  been 
a  sizable  farmer  in  the  Rhine  Palatinate — at  that  time 
under  the  French  flag — and  who  brought  with  him  his 
three  small  sons,  Isidor,  Nathan  and  Oscar.  In  their 
veins  was  an  admixture  of  French  and  German  blood. 
In  1919  when  Oscar  S.  Straus  attended  the  Paris 
Peace  Conference  as  the  Chairman  of  the  League  to 
Enforce  Peace,  a  dinner  was  given  to  him  in  Paris  at 
which  Leon  Bourgeois,  the  former  Premier  of  France 
and  the  present  Chairman  of  the  Council  of  the  League 
of  Nations,  presided.  In  his  address  he  referred  to  the 
fact  that  the  father  of  the  guest  of  honor,  Oscar  S. 
Straus,  was  born  a  French  subject. 

To  America,  then,  came  Lazarus  Straus  and  later  his 
little  family,  as  many  and  many  an  immigrant  has 
come,  before  and  since — seeking  his  fortune  and  asking 
no  odds  save  a  fair  opportunity  and  a  freedom  from 
persecution.  They  landed  in  Philadelphia,  where  a 
little  inquiry,  among  old  friends  who  had  come  to  the 
United  States  a  few  years  before,  developed  the  fact 
that  the  best  business  opportunities  of  the  moment 
seemed  to  center  in  the  South.  Oglethorpe,  Ga.,  was 
regarded  by  them  as  a  particularly  good  town. 
With  this  fact  established,  Lazarus  Straus  started 
South  and  did  not  end  his  travels  until  he  had  reached 
Georgia,  then  popularly  regarded  as  its  "empire  state." 
Through  Georgia  he  found  his  way  slowly,  a  small 
stock  of  goods  with  him  and  selling  as  he  went  in  order 
to  make  his  meagre  living  expenses,  until  he  was  come 


The  Coming  of  Isidor  and  Nathan  Straus      49 

to  Talbot  County,  which  proudly  announced  itself  as 
"the  empire  county  of  the  empire  state." 

It  was  in  court-week  that  Lazarus  Straus  first 
marched  into  Talboton,  its  shire-town,  and  took  a  good 
long  look  at  his  surroundings.  At  first  glance  he  liked 
it.  It  was  brisk  and  busy;  if  you  have  been  in  an  old- 
fashioned  county-seat  in  court-week  you  will  quickly 
recall  what  a  lot  of  enterprise  and  bustle  that  annual  or 
semi-annual  event  arouses.  But  that  was  not  all. 
Talboton  did  not  have  the  slovenly  look  of  so  many  of 
the  small  Southern  towns  of  that  period.  It  was  trim 
and  neatj  its  houses  and  lawns  and  flower-pots  alike 
were  well-kept.  It  must  have  brought  back  to  the 
lonely  heart  of  the  man  from  the  Palatinate  the  neat 
small  towns  of  his  Fatherland.  Moreover  it  pos- 
sessed an  excellent  school  system. 

No  longer  would  Lazarus  Straus  tramp  across  the 
land.  He  had  accumulated  enough  to  start  his  store 
on  a  moderate  basis  at  least.  For  three  or  four  days 
he  skirmished  about  the  town  looking  for  a  location, 
until  he  found  a  tailor  who  was  willing  to  rent  one-half 
of  his  store  to  him.  Even  upon  a  yearly  basis  the 
rental  of  his  part  of  the  shop  would  cost  less  than  the 
annual  license  which  the  state  of  Georgia  required 
itinerants  to  buy.  The  opportunity  was  opened.  A 
resident  of  Talboton  he  became.  There  in  its  friend- 
liness and  culture  he  brought  his  family  and  set  up  his 
little  home. 

The  business  prospered  so  rapidly  that  within  -a  few 
weeks  he  was  obliged  to  seek  larger  quarters.  A  whole 
store  he  found  this  time,  so  roomy  that  he  needs  must 


5O  The  Romance  of  a  Great  Store 

go  back  again  to  Philadelphia  to  find  sufficient  stock  to 
fill  its  shelves.  His  original  stock  he  had  purchased 
at  Oglethorpe,  which,  although  much  larger  than 
Talboton,  had  apparently  not  appealed  to  him  the  half 
as  much. 

"Aren't  you  going  to  buy  your  new  stock  at  Ogle- 
thorpe?" his  fellow  merchants  of  the  little  county-seat 
asked  him.  He  shook  his  head.  And  they  shook 
theirs. 

"The  merchants  of  Oglethorpe  will  not  like  it  if  you 
pass  them  by  and  go  on  to  Philadelphia." 

But  the  founder  of  the  house  of  Straus  in  America 
kept  his  own  counsel  and  followed  his  own  good  judg- 
ment. He  went  to  Philadelphia,  found  his  friends 
again,  who  had  known  his  family  in  the  Rhine,  either 
personally  or  by  reputation,  obtained  their  credit  assist- 
ance and  with  it  bought  and  carried  south  such  wares  as 
Talbot  County  had  not  before  known,  with  the  result 
that  the  business,  now  fairly  launched,  was  carried  to 
new  reaches  of  success. 

If  there  had  been  no  Civil  War  it  is  entirely  probable 
that  this  record  would  never  have  been  written — that 
there  would  be  in  1922  no  Macy  store  in  New  York  to 
come  into  printed  history.  It  was  in  fact  that  great 
conflict  that  brought  disaster  to  so  many  hundreds  and 
thousands  of  businesses — big  and  little — that  ended  the 
career  of  L.  Straus  of  Talboton,  Georgia,  U.  S.  A.  But 
not  at  first.  At  first,  you  will  recall,  the  South  marched 
quite  gaily  into  the  conflict.  She  was  rich,  prosperous, 
well-populated.  Impending  conflict  looked  like  little 


The  Coming  of  hidor  and  Nathan  Straus       51 

else  than  a  great  adventure.  Lazarus  Straus'  oldest 
son,  Isidor,  who  had  been  destined  for  military  train- 
ing— having  already  been  entered  at  the  Southern 
Military  College,  at  Collingsworth,  to  prepare  for 
West  Point — could  not  restrain  himself  as  he  helped 
organize  a  company  of  half-grown  boys  in  the  village, 
of  which  he  was  immediately  elected  first-lieutenant. 
This  company  asked  the  Governor  of  Georgia  for  arms, 
but  was  refused. 

"There  are  not  enough  guns  for  the  men,  let  alone 
the  boys,"  came  the  words  from  the  ancient  capitol  at 
Macon. 

At  that  time  Lazarus  Straus'  partner,  the  man  who 
was  his  right  hand  and  aid,  did  succeed  in  getting  a  gun 
and  getting  into  the  war.  This  made  a  natural  open- 
ing for  Isidor  in  the  store,  in  which  he  progressed 
rapidly,  for  a  full  eighteen  months.  Then,  the  partner 
having  been  invalided  home  from  the  front,  the  boy 
was  free  to  engage  once  again  in  the  service  of  the 
newly  created  nation  to  which  the  family,  as  well  as  all 
their  friends  roundabout  them,  had  already  given  their 
fealty.  He  went  to  enter  himself  in  the  Georgia  Mili- 
tary Academy,  at  Marietta — a  few  miles  north  of  the 
growing  young  railroad  town  of  Atlanta. 

Then  came  one  of  those  slight  incidents,  seemingly 
trifling  at  the  moment  of  the  occurrence  but  sometimes 
changing  the  entire  trend  of  men  and  their  affairs.  A 
young  man,  already  a  student  at  the  Academy,  volun- 
teered to  introduce  Isidor  Straus  to  his  future  fellow 
students.  When  they  were  come  to  one  of  the  dormi- 
tories and  at  the  door  of  a  living-room,  the  kindly 


52  The  Romance  of  a  Great  Store 

young  man  swung  the  door  open  and  bade  Isidor  enter. 
He  entered,  a  pail  of  water,  nicely  balanced  atop  the 
door,  tumbled  and  its  contents  were  poured  over  the 
novitiate's  head  and  shoulders. 

That  single  hazing  trick  disgusted  Isidor  Straus 
immeasurably.  He  was  a  serious-minded  young  man, 
who  realized  that  Georgia  at  that  moment  was  passing 
through  a  particularly  serious  crisis  in  her  affairs.  For 
such  tomfoolery  and  at  such  a  time  he  had  no  use  what- 
soever. It  settled  his  mind.  He  did  not  enter  the 
school,  but  returned  to  his  hotel,  and  on  the  follow- 
ing day,  going  to  a  nearby  mill,  bought  a  stock  of  grain 
and  began  merchandising  it,  on  his  own  behalf. 

This  was  not  to  last  long,  however.  The  struggling 
Confederacy  needed  his  services  and  needed  them 
badly.  The  fame  of  the  Straus  family — its  great  in- 
genuity and  ability — had  long  since  passed  outside  of 
the  boundaries  of  Talbot  County.  Tongues  wagged 
and  said  that  Isidor  had  inherited  all  of  his  father's 
vision  and  acumen.  That  settled  it.  Lloyd  G. 
Bowers,  a  prominent  Georgian,  was  being  designated  to 
head  a  mission  to  Europe,  to  sell,  if  he  could,  both 
Confederate  bonds  and  cotton  acceptances.  He  chose 
for  his  secretary  and  assistant  Isidor  Straus.  And  early 
in  1863  tne  two  men  embarked  upon  a  small  ship, 
The  May,  in  Charleston  harbor,  which,  in  the  course 
of  a  single  evening,  successfully  performed  the  difficult 
task  of  running  the  blockade  that  guarded  that  port. 
Two  days  later  they  were  at  Nassau  in  the  Bahamas, 
from  which  the  voyage  to  England  was  a  secondary 
and  fairly  easy  matter. 


The  Coming  of  Isidor  and  Nathan  Straus       53 

Despite  the  seeming  hopelessness  of  his  task — for 
already  the  tide  had  turned  and  was  flowing  against  the 
Confederacy — Isidor  Straus  had  a  remarkable  degree 
of  success  in  England.  In  his  later  years  he  was  fond 
of  relating  how,  in  1890,  while  sojourning  abroad,  in 
turning  over  a  telephone  book  in  London  he  came  to  a 
name  which  brought  back  memories  and,  acting  upon 
impulse,  called  that  name  to  the  telephone. 

"Can  you  tell  me  the  price  of  Confederate  bonds  this 
morning?"  he  asked  quietly. 

"Isidor  Straus!"  came  the  astonished  reply.  A  few 
hours  later  a  real  reunion  was  in  progress. 

Long  before  Appomattox  came  the  utter  failure  of 
the  once  brisk  little  store  at  Talboton.  In  fact,  the 
family  had  left  that  small  village — very  nearly  in. 
Sherman's  path — and  had  moved  to  Columbus.  There 
it  sat  in  debt  and  desperation,  as  the  Confederacy  sank 
to  its  inevitable  death.  The  only  ray  of  hope  in  its 
existence  was  the  vague  possibility  of  success  in  Isidores 
trip  to  England.  And  when  the  son  came  back  to 
New  York,  soon  after  Lee's  surrender,  Lazarus  Straus 
went  north  to  meet  him.  Isidor  had  prospered.  Cot- 
ton acceptances  were  not  the  bonds  of  a  defunct  young 
nation.  England  needed  cotton — the  mills  of  Man- 
chester had  stood  idle  for  weeks  and  months  at  a  time. 
Isidor  Straus  knew  when  and  how  to  sell  his  cotton- 
bills — he  was,  in  every  sense  of  the  word,  a  born 
merchant.  He  sold  shrewdly,  lived  frugally,  and 
returned  to  the  United  States  with  $12,000  in  gold 
upon  his  person! 


54  The  Romance  of  a  Great  Store 

This  was  the  nugget  upon  which  a  new  family  begin- 
ning was  made.  There  was  to  be  no  more  South  for 
the  family  of  Straus.  Business  opportunity  down 
there  was  dead — for  a  quarter  of  a  century  at  the  very 
least.  But  business  opportunity  in  New  York  had 
never  seemed  as  great  as  in  the  flush  days  of  success 
and  prosperity  which  followed  the  ending  of  the  war. 
Lazarus  Straus  had  brought  north  in  his  carpet-bag 
more  cotton  acceptances.  But  he  had  not  been  as  for- 
tunate as  his  son  in  having  the  time  and  the  place  to 
sell  them  at  best  advantage.  Cotton  within  a  few 
months  had  fallen  in  the  United  States  to  but  one-half 
of  its  price  of  the  preceding  autumn. 

It  was  fortunate,  indeed,  that  Isidor  Straus  had  his 
little  bag  of  golden  coin  at  that  moment.  It  was  that 
gold  that  enabled  him  to  start  with  his  father,  under 
the  name  of  L.  Straus  &  Son,  a  rather  humble  crockery 
business  in  a  top-floor  loft  at  161  Chambers  Street. 
The  specie  went  toward  the  establishment  of  the  new 
business.  The  debts  of  the  old  were  already  being 
paid.  Lazarus  Straus  was,  I  believe,  one  of  the  few 
Southern  merchants  who  paid  their  debts  in  the  North 
in  full,  and  thereby  secured  a  great  personal  credit. 
This  last  came  without  great  difficulty — in  after  years 
it  was  to  be  said  that  Isidor  Straus  could  raise  more 
money  upon  his  word  alone  than  any  other  man  in 
New  York.  It  was  Mr.  Bliss — of  Bliss  &  Co.,  long  time 
wholesalers  of  the  city  and  predecessors  of  the  well- 
known  Tofft,  Weller  &  Co. — who,  upon  being  applied 
to  by  Isidor  Straus  for  financial  assistance,  asked  what 
he  and  his  father  proposed  to  do  to  regain  their  fortune. 


The  Coming  of  Isidor  and  Nathan  Straus       55 

"Start  in  the  china  business,"  was  the  simple  reply. 

"You  have  your  courage,"  was  Mr.  Bliss's  reply, 
"your  father  at  the  age  of  fifty-seven — and  yourself — 
to  embark  upon  a  brand  new  business,  in  which  neither 
of  you  have  had  the  slightest  experience." 

But  such  was  the  old  New  Yorker's  faith  in  these 
men  that  he  sold  them  the  huge  bill  of  merchandise, 
some  $45,000,  under  which  they  embarked  their  busi- 
ness, saying  that  they  could  pay  him,  one-third  in  cash, 
and  that  he  could  well  afford  to  wait  two  or  even  three 
years  for  the  balance. 

He  did  not  have  to  wait  that  long.  Again  the 
business — in  the  hands  of  hard-working  born  mer- 
chandisers— prospered,  from  the  very  instant  of  its 
beginning.  It  opened  for  selling  and  made  its  first 
sale,  June  i,  1866.  And  again  within  a  few  short 
weeks,  L.  Straus  &  Son  was  demanding  more  room  for 
expansion,  and  getting  it — this  time  in  the  form  of  a 
ground  floor  and  basement  of  that  same  building  in 
Chambers  Street.  It  was  still  both  new  and  young, 
however.  Its  hired  employees  were  but  three:  a 
packer,  his  helper  and  a  selector,  or  stock-room  man. 
Isidor  Straus  ran  all  the  details  of  the  store,  opening  it 
and  closing  it  each  day  and  acting  as  its  book-keeper, 
until  a  year  later  when  Nathan  Straus  came  into  the 
organization,  becoming  its  first  salesman.  The  busi- 
ness was  getting  ahead.  Despite  the  difficulties  and 
the  humbleness  of  its  start  it  had  sold  more  than 
$60,000  worth  of  goods,  in  the  first  twelve  months  of 
its  existence. 

"That  they  were  hard  months,  I  could  not  deny," 


$6  The  Romance  of  a  Great  Store 

said  Isidor  Straus  of  them  in  after  years.  "We  had 
bought  our  house  in  West  Forty-ninth  Street,  so  that 
we  might  have  our  family  life  together,  just  as  we  had 
had  in  those  pleasant  Georgia  days  of  before  the  war. 
More  than  once  we  contemplated  selling  the  house  so 
that  we  might  put  the  proceeds  in  the  business,  but 
always  at  the  last  moment  we  were  able  to  avoid  that 
great  catastrophe." 

And  soon  the  necessity  of  ever  selling  the  house  was 
past.  Prosperity  multiplied.  The  firm  went  beyond 
selling  the  ordinary  grades  of  crockery,  which  America 
had  only  known  up  to  that  time — serviceable  stuff,  but 
thick  and  clumsy  and  heavy — and  began  the  importa- 
tion upon  a  huge  and  increasing  scale,  of  the  more  deli- 
cate and  beautiful  porcelains  of  Europe.  It  added 
manufacturing  to  its  importations.  It  became  an 
authority  upon  fine  China.  And  Nathan  Straus,  its 
salesman,  had  to  scurry  to  keep  apace  with  its  growth — 
already  be  was  becoming  known  as  a  super-salesman. 
He  extended  his  territory  to  the  West  and  in  1869 — 
the  year  of  the  completion  of  the  Union  Pacific  and 
Central  Pacific  Railroads — was  going  to  the  West  Coast 
in  search  for  customers.  Two  years  later — a  few  weeks 
after  the  great  fire — he  opened  a  selling-office  for  the 
firm  in  Chicago. 

"Yet  I  do  not  like  this  travel,"  he  said  a  little  later 
to  his  brother.  "Not  only  is  it  very  hard,  physically, 
but  I  find  that  as  soon  as  I  get  away  from  it  the  orders 
fall  off.  We  have  to  work  too  hard  for  the  volume  of 
profit  in  hand." 

With  this  idea  firmly  in  his  mind  he  began  a  more 


The  Coming  of  Isidor  and  Nathan  Straus       57 

intensive  cultivation  of  the  fields  closer  at  hand.  Some 
of  the  establishments  of  New  York  that  later  were  to 
develop  already  were  in  their  beginnings.  There  was 
that  smart  New  Englander  up  at  Fourteenth  Street  and 
Sixth  Avenue — that  man  Macy,  whose  store  already 
was  beginning  to  be  the  talk  of  the  town.  Nathan 
Straus  thought  that  he  would  go  up  and  see  Rowland 
H.  Macy.  And  one  of  the  oldest  employees  of  the 
store  still  recalls  seeing  him  come  into  the  place,  for 
the  first  time  in  his  life,  on  a  Saint  Patricks  Day — it 
probably  was  March  17,  1874 — with  a  paper  package 
under  his  arm  which  contained  a  couple  of  fine  porcelain 
plates. 

Macy  was  a  good  prospect.  For  one  thing,  remem- 
ber that  he  bought  as  well  as  sold  for  cash,  and  for  cash 
alone.  Credit  played  little  or  no  part  in  his  fortunes. 
New  York  had  refused  him  credit  when  first  he  came  to 
her  and  he  had  learned  to  do  without  it.  Macy  was 
not  alone  a  good  prospect  from  that  point  of  view  but 
he  was,  as  we  have  already  seen — a  man  constantly 
seeking  novelty.  Straus  and  his  porcelain  plates  inter- 
ested him  immensely.  And  the  upshot  of  that  first 
call  was  the  assignment  of  a  space  in  the  basement  of 
the  store,  about  twenty-five  by  one  hundred  feet  in  all, 
which  L.  Straus  &  Sons  rented  and  owned.  That  was 
not  a  common  custom  at  that  time,  although  a  little 
later  it  became  a  very  popular  one,  and,  I  think,  pre- 
vails to  a  slight  extent  even  in  these  days.  The  Straus 
experiment  in  the  basement  of  the  Macy  store  paved 
the  way.  It  having  succeeded  remarkably  well  within 
a  short  time  after  its  inception,  other  and  similar 


58  The  Romance  of  a  Great  Store 

departments  were  established  elsewhere  j  at  R.  H. 
White's,  in  Boston,  at  John  Wanamaker's,  in  Phila- 
delphia, at  Wechsler  &  Abraham's,  in  Brooklyn,  and  in 
a  Chicago  store  which  long  since  passed  from  existence. 

Here,  after  all,  was  perhaps  the  real  incarnation  of 
the  department-store  in  America,  as  we  know  it  today, 
and  as  it  is  distinguished  from  the  dry-goods  store  of 
other  days  which,  as  natural  auxiliaries  and  corrolaries 
to  its  business,  had  long  since  added  to  the  mere  selling 
of  dress-goods  that  of  hosiery,  boots  and  shoes,  under- 
clothing, ribbons,  hats  and  other  finesse,  both  of 
women's  and  of  men's  apparel.  We  have  seen  long 
since  the  versatile  Miss  Getchell  adding  groceries  to 
Macy's  departments — and  then  for  a  time  withdrawing 
them — afterwards  toys,  which  were  never  withdrawn. 
Even  then  the  department-store  idea  was  gradually 
being  bornj  with  the  establishment  of  the  Straus 
crockery  store  in  the  basement  of  the  downtown  Macy's 
it  came  into  the  fine  flower  of  its  youth. 

For  fourteen  years  this  arrangement  prospered  and 
progressed — grew  greatly  in  public  favor.  The  store, 
as  we  have  seen,  had  passed  out  of  the  hands  of  its  orig- 
inal proprietors.  Death  had  claimed  four  of  them — 
within  a  short  period  of  barely  thirty  months.  And  a 
new  generation  had  come  in.  But  within  a  decade  of 
the  time  that  he  had  entered  the  organization,  one  of  the 
partners  of  this  second  generation,  Mr.  Wheeler,  was 
considering  leaving  it.  Colorado  had  fascinated  him. 
To  Colorado  he  must  go.  To  Colorado  he  did  go. 
He  sold  his  interest  to  his  partner,  Mr.  Webster,  who 


The  Coming  of  Isidor  and  Nathan  Straus       59 

in  turn  sold  it  to  Isidor  and  Nathan  Straus.  The 
crockery  counter  had  absorbed  the  great  store  which  it 
had  entered  so  humbly  but  fourteen  years  before,  as  a 
mere  tenant  of  one  of  its  tiny  corners. 

Now  were  there  indeed  real  guiding  hands  upon  the 
enterprise.  Force  and  energy  and  ability  had  come  to 
direct  the  fortunes  of  what  was  already  probably  the 
largest  merchandising  establishment  within  the  entire 
land.  A  family  which  had  not  known  failure,  save  as 
a  spur  to  repeated  efforts,  had  come  into  control.  It 
had  everything  to  gain  by  the  venture  and  it  did  not 
propose  to  lose. 

The  actual  consolidation  and  transfer  of  interests 
took  place  on  January  i,  1888.  Mr.  Webster,  as  has 
already  been  recorded,  retained  his  actual  interest  in 
the  store  until  1896,  when  he  retired,  disposing  of  it 
to  his  partners  but  maintaining  an  office  in  their  build- 
ing until  his  death,  in  1916.  He  gave  way  deferen- 
tially, however,  to  the  Straus  energy  and  Straus 
experience.  The  effects  of  these  were  visible  from  the 
beginning. 

The  personality  of  the  Straus  family  had,  of  course, 
become  well  identified  with  the  store  long  before  the 
accomplishment  of  its  reorganization.  The  crockery  de- 
partment had  grown  to  one  of  its  really  huge  features. 
In  it  Nathan  Straus  was  perhaps  more  often  seen  than 
Isidor,  who  always  was  of  a  quieter  and  more  retiring 
nature.  Many  of  the  employees  remember  how  Nathan 
Straus  came  to  the  store  on  the  morning  of  the  first 
day  of  the  blizzard  of  March,  1888.  By  some  strange 
fatality  that  morning  had  been  appointed  weeks  in 


60  The  Romance  of  a  Great  Store 

advance  as  the  store's  annual  Spring  Millinery  Open- 
ing— a  vernal  festival  of  more  than  passing  interest  to 
a  considerable  proportion  of  New  York's  population. 
The  actual  morning  found  the  city  far  more  interested 
in  getting  its  milk  and  bread  than  its  straw-hats  for 
oncoming  summer.  A  large  number  of  the  employees 
of  the  millinery  department  who  had  remained  in  the 
store  late  the  preceding  evening  in  order  to  complete 
the  preparations  of  the  great  event  were  compelled  to 
remain  there  the  entire  night,  being  both  fed  and 
housed  by  the  firm.  They  were  there  when  Nathan 
Straus  arrived.  Even  the  elevated  railroad  which  he 
and  many  others  had  looked  upon  as  a  reliance  after 
the  complete  and  early  collapse  of  the  surface  lines, 
had  finally  broken  under  the  unparalleled  fierceness  of 
the  storm.  And  Nathan  Straus,  after  arriving  on  a 
train  within  a  comparatively  few  blocks  of  the  store, 
was  long  delayed  there,  between  the  stations,  and 
finally  came  to  the  street  on  a  ladder  and  made  his  way 
to  the  store  through  the  very  teeth  of  the  gale. 

That  was  dramatic.  It  was  not  so  dramatic  when, 
time  and  time  again,  both  he  and  his  brother,  Isidor, 
would  insist  upon  bundling  themselves  in  all  sorts  of 
disagreeable  weather  and  going  downtown  or  up, 
because  an  old  employee  of  L.  Straus  &  Son  was  to  be 
buried  or  a  new  one  of  the  retail  store  was  ill.  The 
fidelity  and  the  inherent  affection  of  these  men  was 
marked  more  than  once  by  those  who  work  with  and 
for  them.  And  what  it  gave  to  the  store  in  esfrit-de- 
corps — in  the  thing  which  we  have  very  recently  come 
to  know  as  morale — cannot  easily  be  estimated. 


The  Coming  of  Isidor  and  Nathan  Straus       61 

In  this,  its  fourth  decade,  many  distinguished  New 
Yorkers  still  came  to  the  store.  One  remembers  a 
President  of  the  United  States  who  came  often  and  who 
brought  his  Secretary  of  the  Treasury  with  him  more 
than  once.  The  President  was  Grover  Cleveland  and 
his  Secretary  of  the  Treasury  was  John  G.  Carlisle  and 
they  were  both  intimate  friends  of  the  brothers  Straus. 
And  there  came  often  among  customers  and  friends 
the  late  Russell  Sage.  Macy's  sold  an  unlaundered 
shirt,  linen  bosom  and  cuffs  with  white  cotton  back  and 
at  a  fixed  price  of  sixty-eight  cents,  which  seemed  to 
have  a  vast  appeal  to  Mr.  Sage.  Yet  he  never  pur- 
chased many  at  a  time — never  more  than  two  or  three. 
He  was  a  financier  and  did  not  believe  in  tying  up 
unnecessary  capital. 

To  the  store  from  time  to  time  came  Mrs.  Paran 
Stevens.  And  one  day  while  waiting  for  Mr.  Hibbon 
of  the  housef  urnishing  department,  she  told  Miss  Julia 
Neville,  one  of  the  women  on  the  floor  there,  that  while 
upon  an  extended  trip  abroad  she  had  written  instruc- 
tions to  her  agents  in  this  country  to  sell  certain  of  her 
personal  belongings  and  that  upon  her  return  she  was 
astounded  to  find  that  a  glass  toilet  set,  which  she  had 
purchased  at  Macy's  for  but  ninety-nine  cents  and  from 
which  the  price-mark  had  long  since  been  removed  had 
been  sold  by  them  at  auction  for  one  hundred  dollars! 


V.     The  Store  Treks  Uptown 

WITH  the  beginning  of  a  new  century  New  York 
was  once  again  in  turmoil.  Always  a  restless 
city,  the  year  1900  found  her  suffering  severe  growing 
pains.  Manhattan  Island  seemingly  was  not  large 
enough  for  the  city  that  demanded  elbow  room  upon 
it.  Moreover,  a  distinct  factor  in  the  growth  of  New 
York  was  not  only  planned  but  under  construction. 
Its  final  completion — in  1904 — was  already  being 
anticipated.  I  am  referring  to  the  subway.  After  a 
quarter  of  a  century  of  talk  and  even  one  or  two  rather 
futile  actual  experiments,  a  real  rapid-transit  railroad 
up  and  down  the  backbone  of  Manhattan  finally  was 
under  way.  As  originally  planned  it  extended  from 
the  City  Hall  up  Lafayette  Street  and  Fourth  Avenue 
to  the  Grand  Central  Station,  at  which  point  it  turned 
an  abrupt  right  angle  and  proceeded  through  Forty- 
second  Street  to  Times  Square,  where  it  again  turned 
abruptly — north  this  time — into  Broadway,  which  it 
followed  almost  to  the  city  line;  first  to  the  Harlem 
River  at  Kingsbridge  and  eventually  to  its  present 
terminus  at  Van  Cortlandt  Park.  A  branch  line, 
thrusting  itself  toward  the  east  from  Ninety-sixth 
Street,  emerged  upon  an  elevated  structure  which  it 
followed  to  the  Bronx  Park  and  Zoological  Gardens. 

63 


64  The  Romance  of  a  Great  Store 

Before  this  original  section  of  the  subway  was  com- 
pleted it  already  was  in  process  of  extension  toward 
the  south  j  from  the  City  Hall  to  and  under  the  South 
Ferry  to  Brooklyn  which  it  reached  in  two  successive 
leaps j  the  first  to  the  Borough  Hall  (the  old  Brooklyn 
City  Hall)  and  the  second  to  the  Atlantic  Avenue 
station  of  the  Long  Island  Railroad,  which  has 
remained  its  terminus  until  within  the  past  twelve- 
month. More  recently  the  original  subway  system  of 
Greater  New  York  has  been  so  changed  and  enlarged 
as  to  all  but  lose  sight  of  the  original  plan.  Instead 
of  a  single  main-stem  up  the  backbone  of  New  York, 
there  are  now  two  parallel  trunks — the  one  on  the  east 
side  of  the  town  and  the  other  upon  the  west — and  the 
now  isolated  link  of  the  original  main  line  in  Forty- 
second  Street  has  become  a  shuttle  service  from  the 
Grand  Central  Station  to  Times  Square  and  the  cross- 
bar of  the  letter  "H"  which  forms  the  rough  plan  of 
the  entire  system.  Still  other  underground  railroads 
have  come  to  supplement  the  vast  task  of  this  original 
system.  It  is  more  than  a  decade  since  the  energy  of 
William  G.  McAdoo  completed  the  Hudson  River 
Tubes,  which  an  earlier  generation  had  had  the  vision 
but  not  the  ability  to  build,  and  brought  their  upper 
stem  through  and  under  Sixth  Avenue  and  to  a  terminal 
at  Herald  Square  j  while  even  more  recently  the 
huge  and  far-reaching  Brooklyn  Rapid  Transit  system 
has  appropriated  Broadway,  Manhattan,  for  a  vastly 
elongated  terminal  j  which  takes  the  concrete  form  of 
a  four-tracked  underground  railroad  beneath  that 
world-famed  street  all  the  way  from  the  City  Hall  to 


The  Store  Treks  Uptown  65 

Times  Square  and  above  that  point  through  Seventh 
Avenue  to  Fifty-ninth  Street  and  Central  Park}  and 
thence  across  the  Queensborough  Bridge. 

It  was  the  original  subway,  however,  that  brought 
the  great  real-estate  upheaval  to  New  York.  Many 
years  before  it  was  completed  New  York  had  been 
moving  steadily  uptown — shrewd  observers  used  to 
say  at  the  rate  of  ten  of  the  short  city  blocks  each  ten 
years.  But  its  progress  had  been  slow  and  dignified — 
relatively  at  least.  With  the  coming  of  the  new  sub- 
way, dignity  in  this  movement  was  thrown  to  the  four 
winds.  A  mad  rush  uptown.  Wholesale  firms 
abandoned  the  structures  that  had  housed  them  for 
years  in  the  business  districts  south  of  Fourteenth 
Street  and  began  to  look  for  newer  and  larger  quarters 
north  of  that  important  cross-town  thoroughfare.  The 
retail  world  of  New  York  was  far  slower  to  be  influ- 
enced by  the  change.  For  one  thing,  its  investment  in 
permanent  structures  was  relatively  much  higher  than 
that  of  the  wholesale.  Folk  who  came  from  afar  and 
who  marveled  at  the  elegance  of  Sixth  Avenue  as  a 
shopping  street,  all  the  way  from  Thirteenth  to 
Twenty-third,  could  hardly  have  conceived  that  within 
two  decades  it  would  become  dusty,  forlorn,  practically 
deserted.  No  matter  that  the  hotel  life  of  New  York 
had  ascended  well  to  the  north  of  Twenty-third,  that 
the  theaters  were  beginning  to  gather  even  north  of 
Thirty-fourth,  that  a  few  small,  smart,  exclusive  shops 
were  showing  signs  of  joining  the  trek — there  remained 
the  realty  investment  in  the  department  stores  at  Sixth 
Avenue.  It  seemed  incredible  that  such  a  huge  invest- 


66  The  Romance  of  a  Great  Store 

ment  should  be  thrown  to  the  winds.  Yet  this  was  the 
very  thing  that  actually  was  accomplished. 

Macy's  stood  to  lose  less  in  an  economic  sense  from 
a  move  uptown  than  any  of  its  competitors.  True  it 
was  that  the  firm  had  builded  for  its  own  account  in 
Fourteenth  Street,  just  east  of  the  original  store,  a  very 
handsome,  steel-constructed,  stone-fronted  building 
which  it  had  thrown  into  the  older  building  in  order  to 
relieve  the  pressure  upon  it.  Across  the  way,  on  the 
north  side  of  Fourteenth  Street,  it  had  put  up  at  an 
even  earlier  date  a  substantial  seven-story  store  for  the 
use  of  its  greatly  expanded  furniture  department. 
The  original  store,  however,  stood  upon  leased  land — 
the  property  of  the  Rhinelander  Estate.  One  of  the 
earliest  of  the  stories  about  Mr.  Macy  concerns  the 
coming  of  George  Rogers,  the  agent  of  the  estate  and 
his  warm  personal  friend  as  well,  each  Monday  morn- 
ing j  not  for  his  rentj  but  to  cash  a  check  for  thirty 
dollars.  It  was  not  hard  to  guess  at  his  compensation. 

The  increase  in  land  rentals  in  the  neighborhood  and 
the  fact  that  the  firm  could  hardly  hope  ever  to  acquire 
an  actual  title  to  the  valuable  site  of  its  main  store, 
coupled  with  the  steadily  increasing  trek  uptown, 
caused  the  Macy  management  to  consider  seriously 
whether  it  would  join  in  the  northward  movement. 
It  soon  would  have  to  do  one  thing  or  the  other.  The 
old  store  was  growing  very  old  and  very  overcrowded. 
Moreover,  it  was,  at  the  best,  a  makeshift,  a  jumbling 
together  of  one  separate  store  after  another  in  order 
to  accommodate  a  business  which  forever  refused  to 
stay  put.  Under  such  conditions  a  scientific  or  efficient 


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67 

planning  of  the  building  had  been  quite  out  of  the 
question.  The  real  wonder  was  that  the  business  had 
been  conducted  so  well,  against  such  a  handicap. 

The  move  once  considered  was  quickly  determined 
upon.  No  other  course  seemingly  would  have  been 
possible.  To  have  erected  a  new  store  building  upon 
a  leasehold  in  a  quarter  of  the  town  which  presently 
might  begin  to  slide  backward — would  have  been  a 
precarious  experiment,  to  put  it  mildly.  It  must  go 
uptown.  The  only  question  that  really  confronted 
the  store  was  just  where  to  go  uptown.  A  site  large 
enough  for  a  huge  department-store  is  not  usually 
acquired  overnight.  Moreover,  the  necessity  for 
secrecy  in  so  important  a  step  was  obvious — the  dangers 
of  the  mere  suggestion  of  its  becoming  known  were 
multifold. 

With  these  things  clearly  understood,  the  search  for 
a  new  site  was  begun.  Various  ones  were  considered, 
but  were  finally  rejected.  For  a  time  the  firm  con- 
sidered buying  the  famous  old  Gilsey  House  and  the 
property  immediately  adjoining  it.  Another  site 
which  appealed  to  it  even  more  was  the  former  site  of 
the  Broadway  Tabernacle  on  the  east  side  of  Broadway, 
just  north  of  Thirty-fourth  Street — the  site  of  the 
present  Marbridge  Building.  The  commanding  pres- 
cience of  this  corner  forced  itself  upon  them.  Sixth 
Avenue,  an  artery  street  north  and  south,  threaded  by 
electric  surface-cars  and  the  elevated  railroad — the 
McAdoo  Tubes  had  not  then  come  into  even  a  paper 
being — was  crossed  at  acute  angles  by  an  even  more 


68  The  Romance  of  a  Great  Store 

important  street — New  York's  incomparable  Broad- 
way— and  at  right  angles  by  Thirty-fourth  Street, 
which  even  then  was  giving  promise  of  its  coming  im- 
portance. The  original  planners  of  the  uptown  city 
of  New  York  made  many  serious  mistakes  in  their  far- 
seeing  scheme.  But  they  made  no  mistake  when  they 
took  each  half  mile  or  so  and  made  one  of  their  cross 
streets  into  a  thoroughfare  as  bold  and  as  wide  as  one 
of  their  north  and  south  avenues.  Thirty-fourth  was 
one  of  the  streets  picked  out  for  such  importance.  And 
from  the  beginning  it  realized  the  judgment  of  its 
planners.  The  completion  of  the  huge  Waldorf- 
Astoria  Hotel  in  1897  (the  earlier  or  Waldorf  side  in 
Thirty-third  Street  had  been  finished  in  1893)  had 
fixed  the  importance  of  the  street.  Thirteen  years 
later  the  opening  of  the  Pennsylvania  Station  was  to 
confirm  it — for  all  time. 

In  1900  the  vast  plan  of  the  Pennsylvania  Railroad 
for  the  invasion  of  Manhattan  was  as  yet  unknown. 
Even  in  the  main  offices  of  that  railroad,  in  Broad 
Street  Station,  Philadelphia,  it  still  was  most  inchoate 
and  fragmentary.  In  the  language  of  the  moment, 
Macy's  was  "acting  on  its  own."  The  store  was  using 
its  own  powers  of  foreseeing — and  using  them  very 
well  indeed. 

But  the  site  on  the  east  side  of  Herald  Square  was 
not  to  be.  In  free  titles  it  was  not  nearly  large  enough. 
But  the  west  side  of  the  square!  There  was  a  possi- 
bility. If  the  new  store  could  be  builded  there  it  not 
only  could  possess  an  actual  Broadway  frontage  but  it 
would  be  set  so  far  back  from  the  elevated  railroad  as 


not  to  be  bothered  by  its  noise  or  smoke,  even  in  the 
slightest  degree.  As  a  matter  of  fact  the  last  already 
was  disappearing.  The  electric  third-rail  system  was 
being  installed  everywhere  upon  the  Manhattan  system, 
and  the  pertinacious,  puffy  little  locomotives,  which  so 
long  had  been  a  feature  of  New  York  town,  were 
doomed  to  an  early  disappearance. 

The  west  side  of  Herald  Square  appealed  to  Macy's. 
Long  and  exacting  searches  into  its  land-titles  were 
made.  Some  three  hundred  feet  back  of  Broadway 
the  magnificent  new  theater  of  Koster  &  BiaPs,  extend- 
ing all  the  way  from  Thirty-fourth  Street  to  Thirty- 
fifth,  backed  up  a  tract  which  in  the  main  was  occupied 
by  comparatively  low  buildings,  the  most  of  them 
brown-stone  residences,  which  already  were  in  the 
course  of  transformation  into  small  business  places. 
This  tract  seemingly  was  quite  large  enough  for  the 
new  Macy's — with  the  possible  exception,  perhaps,  of 
its  engine-room  and  mechanical  departments.  The 
firm  decided  to  take  it,  and  with  a  policy  of  magnificent 
secrecy  began  negotiations  for  its  lease.  In  order  to 
accommodate  the  engine  and  machinery  rooms  it  pur- 
chased a  tract  upon  the  north  side  of  Thirty-fifth  Street 
just  back  of  the  former  Herald  Square  Theater.  On 
this  last  land  stood  two  of  New  York's  most  notorious 
resorts  of  twenty  years  ago — the  Pekin  and  the  Tivoli. 
The  development  of  the  Macy  plan  drove  them  out  of 
the  street  and,  for  the  time  being  at  least,  out  of 
business. 

The  Macy  plan  did  not  go  through  to  a  final 


yo  The  Romance  of  a  Great  Store 

culmination,  however,  quite  as  it  had  been  laid  out. 
So  huge  a  scheme  and  one  involving  so  many  separate 
real-estate  transactions  is  hard  to  keep  a  secret  for  any 
great  length  of  time.  Gradually  the  news  of  Macy's 
contemplated  step  became  public  property.  It  caused 
public  astonishment  and  public  acclaim.  For,  remem- 
ber, if  you  will,  that  in  1900,  none  of  the  department 
stores  had  moved  uptown  north  of  Twenty-third  Street. 
Bloomingdale's  was  at  Third  Avenue  and  Fifty-ninth 
and  Sixtieth  Streets,  but  it  was  a  gradual  upgrowth, 
from  a  modest  beginning  upon  that  original  important 
corner.  The  last  move  had  been  in  1862,  when 
A.  T.  Stewart  had  moved  his  store  from  Chambers 
Street  north  to  Ninth.  The  cost  of  the  lot  and  struc- 
ture to  Mr.  Stewart  was  $2,750,000 — a  stupendous 
figure  in  that  day. 

The  publicity  surrounding  the  proposed  move  of 
Macy's  found  the  Straus  family  still  without  one  of  the 
plots  necessary  to  the  complete  acquisition  of  all  the 
land  in  the  block  east  of  Koster  &  BiaPs.  It  was  the 
small  but  important  northwest  corner  of  Broadway  and 
Thirty-fourth  Street — a  mere  thirty  by  fifty  feet,  a 
remnant  of  an  ancient  farm  whose  zig-zag  boundaries 
antedated  the  coming  of  the  city  plan  and  showed  a 
seeming  fine  contempt  for  it.  This  tiny  parcel  was  the 
property  of  an  old-time  New  Yorker,  the  Rev.  Duane 
Pell.  Dr.  Pell  was  on  an  extended  trip  in  Europe  in 
1901,  when  Macy's  began  the  active  acquisition  of  its 
new  store-site.  It  was  given  to  understand  that  his 
asking  price  for  the  small  corner  was  $250,000;  an 


The  Store  Treks  Uptown  71 

astonishing  figure  for  such  a  tiny  bit  of  land,  even 
today,  but  Dr.  Pell  felt  that  he  held  the  key  to  the 
entire  important  Herald  Square  corner  and  that  he  was 
justified  in  asking  any  price  for  it  that  he  saw  fit  to  ask. 
While  the  plot  was  so  small  as  to  afford  very  little 
to  it  in  the  way  of  actual  floor  space  the  Macy  manage- 
ment felt  that  it  was  so  essential  to  the  appearance  of 
the  store  that  it  agreed  to  come  to  Dr.  PelPs  price — 
and  so  cabled  him;  in  Spain.  Word  came  back  that  he 
was  about  to  embark  for  New  York  and  that  he  would 
take  up  the  entire  matter  immediately  upon  his  arrival. 

A  few  years  before  the  Macy  organization  planned 
to  be  the  initial  department-store  to  move  uptown, 
Henry  Siegel,  a  Chicago  merchant,  who  had  achieved 
a  somewhat  spectacular  and  ephemeral  success  in  that 
city,  decided  upon  the  invasion  of  New  York.  He 
came  to  Manhattan  and  in  Sixth  Avenue,  midway 
between  Fourteenth  and  Twenty-third  Streets,  erected 
a  store  which  for  a  time  duplicated  the  success  of  its 
Chicago  predecessor.  The  proposed  move  of  the  Macy 
store  apparently  filled  him  with  consternation.  With 
a  good  deal  of  prophetic  vision  he  foresaw  that  other 
Sixth  Avenue  stores  would  go  uptown  in  its  wake.  His 
own  investment  in  that  street  was  too  great  and  too 
recent  to  be  jeopardized. 

Siegel  hit  upon  the  idea  of  stepping  into  the  old  site 
and  building  at  Fourteenth  Street  and  Sixth  Avenue  as 
soon  as  the  Macy  organization  should  vacate.  But  to 
desire  that  valuable  location  and  to  secure  it  were  two 
vastly  different  things.  The  Strauses  were  not  asleep 


72  The  Romance  of  a  Great  Store 

to  the  possibility  of  some  one  attempting  such  a  move. 
It  would  not  be  the  first  time  in  merchandising  history. 
They  arranged  carefully  therefore  that  their  old  corner 
at  Fourteenth  Street  and  Sixth  Avenue  should  remain 
entirely  empty  for  two  years  after  they  had  moved 
out  from  it.  The  moral  and  educational  effect  of  such 
a  hiatus  was  not  to  be  underestimated. 

In  the  meantime  the  Chicago  man  was  busy  on  his 
own  behalf.  Through  his  realty  agents  he  had  quickly 
discovered  Dr.  Duane  Pell's  ownership  of  the  corner 
point  of  the  new  Macy  plot.  He  also  found  that  the 
dominie  was  already  on  his  return  to  the  United  States. 
He  entrusted  to  a  faithful  representative  the  task  of 
meeting  him  at  the  steamer-pier.  The  agent  was  there, 
bright  and  early,  to  meet  the  boat,  and  within  a  half- 
hour  of  its  docking  Siegel  had  acquired  the  north-west 
corner  of  Broadway  and  Thirty-fourth  Street. 

Now  was  the  Chicagoan  in  a  strategic  position  to  do 
business  with  the  Macy  concern.  At  least  so  he  felt. 
The  concern  felt  differently.  As  far  as  it  was  con- 
cerned the  corner  point  had  sentimental  value  j  nothing 
else.  We  already  have  seen  how  slight  was  its  floor- 
space.  Without  hesitation  it  turned  its  back  upon  the 
tiny  corner,  and  with  the  money  that  it  had  intended 
investing  in  it,  purchased  the  leasehold  of  the  huge 
theater  of  Koster  &  Bial — about  twenty  thousand 
square  feet  of  ground  space — which  enabled  it  to  place 
its  mechanical  departments  (engine-rooms  and  the 
like)  in  its  main  building,  and  so  to  leave  the  former 
Tivoli  and  Pekin  sites  for  the  moment  unimproved. 
This  done,  it  turned  its  attention  to  the  gentleman  from 


The  Store  Treks  Uptown  73 

Chicago.  It  leased  him  the  premises  at  Fourteenth 
Street  at  a  much  higher  figure  than  it  would  have  been 
glad  to  rent  them  to  another  concern,  and  under  the 
provisions  that  they  should  not  be  occupied  until  at 
least  two  years  after  the  removal  of  the  parent  concern 
from  them  and  that  the  name  "Macy"  should  never 
again  appear  on  the  buildings  of  that  site. 

With  the  site  difficulties  cleared  up,  the  actual  con- 
struction problems  of  the  enterprise  were  entered  upon. 
Nineteen  hundred  and  one  was  born  before  Macy's  was 
enabled  to  begin  the  wholesale  destruction  of  the  many 
buildings  upon  its  new  site.  The  job  of  clearing  the 
site  and  erecting  the  new  building  was  entrusted  to  the 
George  A.  Fuller  Company,  which  had  just  completed 
the  sensational  Flatiron  Building  at  the  apex  of  Fifth 
Avenue  and  Broadway  at  Twenty-third  Street,  and  it 
was  one  of  the  first,  if  not  the  very  first  of  the  building 
contracts  in  New  York  where  the  estimates  were  based 
upon  the  cubic  feet  contents.  DeLomas  and  Cordes, 
who  had  had  a  considerable  success  in  the  planning  of 
one  or  two  of  the  more  recent  department  stores  in  the 
lower  Sixth  Avenue  district,  were  chosen  as  the  achi- 
tects  of  the  new  building.  Before  they  entered  upon 
the  actual  drawing  of  the  plans  they  made  an  extended 
study  of  such  structures,  both  in  the  United  States  and 
abroad.  The  new  building  represented  the  last  word 
in  department  store  design  and  construction.  Nine 
stories  in  height  and  with  1,012,500  square  feet  of 
floor-space,  it  was  designed  not  only  to  handle  great 
throngs  of  shoppers  each  day  but  the  multifold  working 
details  of  service  to  them,  with  the  greatest  expedition, 


74  The  Romance  of  a  Great  Store 

and  economy.  To  do  this  it  was  estimated  that  there 
would  be  required  fourteen  passenger  elevators,  ten 
freight  elevators  and  seven  sidewalk  elevators  of  the 
most  recent  type.  Four  escalators  were  installed  run- 
ning from  the  main  floor  to  the  fifth.  It  is  to  be 
noted,  too,  that  these  escalators  were  the  very  first 
to  be  installed  in  which  the  step  upon  which  the 
passenger  rides  is  held  continuously  horizontal.  In 
the  older  types  the  ascending  floor  is  held  at  an 
awkward  angle  of  ascension  and  foothold  is  maintained 
only  by  the  attaching  of  steel  cleats  at  right  angles  to  it. 

Lighting,  ventilation,  plumbing,  all  these  received 
in  turn  the  most  careful  consideration  and  planning. 
For  instance,  it  was  determined  quite  early  in  the 
progress  of  the  planning  for  the  new  Macy  store  that 
it  should  be  ventilated  entirely  by  great  fans,  which, 
sucking  the  air  in  ducts  down  from  the  roof,  would  heat 
it  or  cool  it,  as  the  necessities  of  the  season  might 
demand,  before  distributing  it  through  another  duct  to 
the  working  floors  of  the  building.  In  this  way  the 
close  and  stuffy  atmosphere  somewhat  common  to  old- 
time  department  stores  when  filled  with  patrons  was 
entirely  obviated  in  this  new  one. 

When  we  come  to  the  consideration  of  the  everyday 
workings  of  the  Macy  store  today  we  shall  see  how 
well  these  architects  of  twenty  years  ago  planned  its 
details.  We  shall  not  see,  however,  one  of  the  most 
interesting  of  them.  When  it  was  originally  builded, 
by  far  the  greater  part  of  its  ninth  floor  was  devoted 
to  a  huge  exhibition  hall.  Within  a  short  time  this 
room  was  in  a  fair  way  to  become  as  famous  as  the 


The  Store  Treks  Uptown  75 

larger  auditorium  of  Madison  Square  Garden.  In  it 
were  held  poultry-shows,  flower  shows,  even  one  of  the 
very  first  automobile  shows.  Within  a  few  years  after 
its  opening,  however,  the  business  of  the  store  had 
grown  to  such  proportions  that  it  was  found  necessary 
to  give  its  great  space  to  the  more  mundane  business  of 
direct  selling. 

The  problem  of  the  corner  tip  there  at  Thirty-fourth 
and  Broadway  was  quickly  overcome.  If  the  new 
owner  of  that  point  had  counted  upon  the  new  store 
which  completely  encircled  him  turning  tens  of  thou- 
sands of  folk  past  it  each  day  he  was  doomed  to  disap- 
pointment. For  Macy's  made  its  own  corner  by  means 
of  a  broad  arcade  entirely  within  the  cover  of  its  own 
huge  roof  j  an  inside  street,  lined  with  show-windows 
upon  either  side  and  giving,  in  wet  weather  as  well  as 
fine,  a  dry  and  handsome  passageway  direct  from 
Broadway  into  Thirty-fourth  Street. 

The  original  suggestion  for  such  an  arcade  came  in 
an  anonymous  letter  to  the  original  architects  of  the 
building.  Only  within  the  past  year  or  two  has  this 
passageway  been  abandoned.  The  demands  of  the 
business  for  more  elbow-room  are  voracious  and  appar- 
ently unceasing.  And  the  space  that  the  arcade  con- 
sumed became  entirely  too  great  to  be  used  any  longer 
for  such  a  purpose. 

In  that  summer  of  1901,  while  the  architects  and 
contractors  were  busy  at  their  plans  and  specifications, 
there  was  wholesale  and  systematic  devastation  upon 
such  a  scale  as  New  York  has  rarely  ever  seen.  Such 


76  The  Romance  of  a  Great  Store 

pullings  down  and  tearings  away!  The  scene  was  not 
without  its  drama  at  any  time.  The  writer  well 
remembers  strolling  into  the  Koster  &  Bial  Music  Hall 
on  an  evening  during  that  season  of  destruction.  There 
was  no  one  to  bar  his  passage  into  what,  at  the  time 
of  its  opening,  but  eight  short  years  before,  had  been 
New  York's  most  elaborate  playhouse.  If  his  glance 
had  not  been  turned  downward  there  was  nothing  to 
indicate  that  the  evening  performance  might  not  easily 
begin  within  the  hour.  Upwards  the  great  auditorium 
of  red  and  gold  was  immaculate.  The  proscenium,  the 
tier  upon  tier  of  balcony  and  of  gallery,  the  dozens  of 
upholstered  boxes,  the  exquisitely  decorated  ceiling  had 
not  been  touched. 

But  if  the  eye  glanced  downward — what  a  difference! 
The  main  floor  and  its  row  upon  row  of  heavy  plush 
chairs  was  entirely  gone.  In  their  place  was  a  mucky 
black  sea  of  mudj  a  knee-high  morass,  if  you  please,  in 
which  a  dozen  contractor's  wagons,  hauled  and  tugged 
unevenly  by  squads  of  lunging  mules  and  horses  in 
their  traces,  circled  in  and  circled  out — inbound  empty 
and  outbound  laden  deep  with  their  muddy  burden. 
On  the  stage,  back  of  what  had  once  been  the  footlights 
and  in  the  same  place  where  the  darling  Carmencita  had 
once  been  wont  to  make  her  bow,  stood  a  shirt-sleeved 
gang-boss.  On  either  side  of  him,  spotlights — things 
theatrical  yanked  from  the  memories  of  yesteryear — 
threw  their  radiance  down  into  the  auditorium  and  the 
motley  audience  it  held. 

So  went  Koster  &  Bial's,  the  pet  plaything  of  joyous 
New  York  in  its  Golden  Age.  In  a  short  time  the 


77 

scaffolding  was  to  rise  in  that  mighty  amphitheater  and 
the  decorations  to  come  tumbling  down.  Gang  upon 
gang  to  the  roof  j  more  gangs  still  to  the  stout  side- 
walls,  brick  by  brick  j  down  they  came  until  Koster  & 
BiaPs  was  no  more.  Its  site  was  marked  by  a  huge 
and  gaping  hole  in  the  subsoil  of  Manhattan. 

There  were  other  phases  of  that  tearing-down  that 
were  less  dramatic  and  more  comic.  A  restaurant- 
keeper  who  had  a  small  eating  place  on  the  Broadway 
side  of  the  site  sought  obdurately  to  hold  out  in  his 
location — seeking  an  advantageous  cash  settlement 
from  the  store  owners.  His  lease,  perfectly  good, 
still  had  from  sixty  to  ninety  days  to  run.  He  felt  that 
the  store  could  not  wait  that  length  of  time  upon  him — 
that,  in  the  language  of  the  street,  it  would  be  forced 
to  "come  across."  But  it  did  not  "come  across."  It 
was  not  built  that  way.  It  was  built  on  either  side  of 
the  restaurant.  Its  steel  girders  were  far  above  its 
tiny  walls  and  spanning  one  another  across  its  ceiling 
before  its  disappointed  proprietor  moved  out — at  the 
end  of  his  perfectly  good  lease — and  without  one  cent 
of  bonus  money  in  his  pocket  j  after  which  it  was 
almost  a  matter  of  mere  hours  to  tear  the  flimsy  struc- 
ture away  and  remove  a  small  segment  of  earth  that 
held  it  up  to  street  level.  A  barber  around  the  corner 
in  Thirty-fourth  street  caught  his  cue  from  the 
restaurant.  He,  too,  was  going  to  stand  pat.  But 
he  was  not  in  the  same  strategic  position  as  the 
restaurateur.  He  had  no  lease.  He  merely  was 
going  to  stay  and  defy  the  wreckers.  They  would  not 
dare  to  touch  his  neat,  immaculate  shop. 


7 8  The  Romance  of  a  Great  Store 

They  did  dare.  On  the  very  night  that  his  lease 
expired  something  happened  to  the  business  enterprise 
of  the  razor-wielder.  A  cyclone  must  have  struck  it. 
At  least  that  was  the  way  it  looked.  The  barber, 
coming  down  to  business  on  the  morrow,  found  his 
movables  upon  the  sidewalk,  neatly  piled  together  and 
covered  by  tarpaulins  against  the  weather.  But  the 
shop  was  gone.  Where  it  had  stood  on  the  close  of 
the  preceding  day  was  a  deep  hole  in  the  ground j  and 
three  Italian  workmen  were  whistling  the  Anvil  Chorus. 

About  the  tenth  of  October,  1901,  actual  construction 
began  on  the  new  building.  On  the  first  day  of 
November  of  the  following  year  it  was  complete — or 
practically  so.  It  was  a  record  for  building,  even  in 
New  York,  which  is  fairly  used  to  records  of  that  sort. 
A  steel-framed  nine-story  building,  approximately  four 
hundred  feet  on  Thirty-fourth  and  Thirty-fifth  Streets, 
by  one  hundred  and  eighty  feet  on  Broadway  (widen- 
ing to  two  hundred  feet  at  the  west  end  of  the 
store),  with  1,012,500  square  feet  of  floor-space,  and 
13,500,000  cubic  feet  in  all,  had  been  erected  in  a  trifle 
over  six  months.  In  the  meanwhile  the  wisdom  of  the 
Macy  choice  of  location  was  already  being  made  evi- 
dent. A  Washington  concern — Saks  and  Company — 
was  on  its  way  toward  Herald  Square.  It  took  the 
west  side  of  Broadway  for  the  block  just  south  of 
Thirty-fourth  Street,  and  by  dint  of  great  effort  and 
because  its  building  was  considerably  smaller  in  area, 
succeeded  in  getting  into  it  ahead  of  Macy's. 

Herald  Square!      There  was,  and  still  is,  a  site  well 


The  Store  Treks  Uptown  79 

worth  rushing  toward.  We  have  seen  already  the 
strategic  advantages  of  the  new  site,  even  as  far  back 
as  1902,  long  before  the  coming  of  the  great  Pennsyl- 
vania Station  just  back  of  it  at  Seventh  Avenue.  Ever 
since  1890,  when  the  remarkable  vision  of  the  late 
James  Gordon  Bennett  had  seen  the  crossing  of  Broad- 
way and  Sixth  Avenue  as  the  finest  possible  location  for 
his  beloved  Herald  and  had  torn  down  the  little  old 
armory  in  the  gorge  between  these  two  thoroughfares, 
Thirty-fifth  and  Thirty-sixth  Streets,  to  build  a 
Venetian  palace  for  it  there,  the  square  had  been  a 
veritable  hub  for  the  vast  activities  of  New  York. 
Hotels,  shops  and  theaters  sprang  up  roundabout  it. 
And  the  coming  of  what  is  one  of  the  finest,  if  not  the 
very  largest,  of  the  great  railroad  terminals  of  the 
land  but  multiplied  its  real  importance. 

The  actual  moving  from  the  old  store  to  the  new  was 
a  herculean  task.  Yet  it  was  accomplished  within  three 
days — which  means  that  large  enterprise  was  reduced 
through  the  perfection  of  system  to  a  rather  ordinary 
one.  This  could  not  have  been  if  all  its  details  and  its 
possibilities  had  not  been  anticipated  long  in  advance 
and  planned  against. 

The  job  was  undertaken  by  the  store  itself  j  through 
its  delivery  department,  in  charge  of  Mr.  James  Price, 
with  Mr.  James  Woods  as  his  very  active  assistant. 
Both  of  these  men  are  veteran  employees  of  Macy's. 
The  service  record  of  the  one  of  them  reaches  to  forty- 
one  years  and  the  other  to  forty-eight.  They  knew  full 
well  the  size  of  the  moving-day  task  that  confronted 


80  The  Romance  of  a  Great  Store 

them.  To  pick  up  a  huge  New  York  department-store 
and  carry  it  twenty  uptown  blocks — almost  an  even 
mile — was  a  deal  of  a  contract.  Yet  neither  of  them 
flinched  at  it.  But  both  put  on  their  thinking-caps  and 
evolved  a  definite  plan  for  it — a  plan  which  in  all  its 
details  worked  without  a  hitch. 

The  old  store  closed  its  doors  for  the  final  time  at 
six  o'clock  in  the  evening  of  Monday,  November  3, 
1902.  The  following  day  was  Election  Day.  The 
movers  voted  early.  They  came  to  the  Fourteenth 
Street  store  not  long  after  daybreak  and  there  began 
the  great  trek  uptown — stock  and  fixtures.  For  three 
days  they  kept  a  steady  procession  j  west  through  Four- 
teenth Street,  then  north  through  Seventh  Avenue — to 
Thirty-fourth — from  the  old  store  to  the  new — and  the 
empty  wagons  returning  down  through  Sixth  Avenue 
to  Fourteenth  Street  once  again.  The  entire  route  was 
carefully  patrolled  by  special  guards  and  policemen, 
and  the  entire  task  finally  accomplished  late  on  Thurs- 
day evening,  the  6th,  at  which  Mr.  Isidor  Straus  was 
called  on  the  telephone  and  told  quietly: 

"We  shall  be  able  to  open  tomorrow  if  you  wish  it.'* 
But  the  head  of  the  house  advised  that  the  opening 
be  set  for  Saturday,  as  had  been  advertised  j  it  would 
give  a  final  valuable  day  for  setting  things  to  rights, 
which  meant  that  at  eight  o'clock  on  the  morning  of 
Saturday,  November  8,  the  new  store  opened  its  doors 
to  the  public  that  was  anxiously  awaiting  the  much 
heralded  event  j  with  as  much  simplicity  and  seeming 
ease  as  if  it  had  been  situated  at  Thirty-fourth  Street 
for  the  entire  forty-four  years  of  its  life,  instead  of 


The  Store  Treks  Uptown  8 1 

but  a  mere  twenty-four  hours.  A  great  task  had  been 
accomplished,  a  long  step  forward  safely  taken — and 
Macy's  was  ready  to  enter  upon  a  new  decade  of  its 
existence. 

In  its  wake  there  came  uptown  the  other  department- 
stores  of  New  Yorkj  one  by  one  until,  with  but  three 
exceptions,  every  one  of  these  establishments  which  had 
been  situated  south  of  Twenty-third  Street  and  which 
are  still  in  business  today,  had  joined  in  the  trek. 
Lord  &  Taylor's  left  its  comfortable  home  at  Broadway 
and  Twentieth  Street,  in  which  it  had  been  housed  for 
nearly  half  a  century  since  coming  north  from  its  orig- 
inal location  in  Grand  Street,  and  moved  to  Fifth 
Avenue  and  Thirty-ninth  j  its  ancient  neighbor  in 
Broadway,  Arnold  Constable  &  Company,  stood  again 
almost  cheek  by  jowl  in  Fifth  Avenue.  McCreery's, 
first  establishing  an  uptown  branch  in  Thirty-fourth 
Street,  eventually  abandoned  its  older  store  in  Twenty- 
third  Street  and  consolidated  its  energies  in  the  upper 
one.  Mr.  Altman  moved  his  business  to  its  new  marble 
palace  at  Fifth  Avenue  and  Thirty-fourth,  and  Stern's 
went  as  far  north  as  Forty-second.  Lower  Sixth 
Avenue  began  to  look  like  a  deserted  village.  Simp- 
son-Crawford's, Greenhut's,  Adam's,  O'Neill's — one 
by  one  these  closed  their  doors  for  the  final  time. 
Once,  and  that  was  but  two  decades  ago,  they  had  been 
household  words  among  the  women  of  New  York. 
Now  their  buildings  were  emptied,  stood  empty  and 
deserted  for  months  and  for  years — in  most  cases  until 
the  coming  of  the  Great  War  and  our  participation  in 


82  The  Romance  of  a  Great  Store 

it,  when  the  Government  was  very  glad  to  make  use  of 
their  spacious  floors  for  war  manufacturing  and  for 
hospitalization.  Of  Macy's  old-time  competitors 
downtown  who  failed  to  join  in  the  uptown  movement, 
but  three  remained — Wanamaker's,  DanielPs  and 
Hearn's,  who  stood  and  still  stand  pat  and  prosperous 
in  the  locations  which  they  have  occupied  for  almost 
half  a  century. 

The  rest  are  all  gone.  Twenty-third  Street,  which 
of  a  Saturday  afternoon  used  to  be  filled  from  Fifth 
Avenue  to  Sixth  with  smart  folk  of  every  sort,  is  as 
dull  as  the  deserted  lower  Sixth  Avenue.  Memories 
walk  its  spacious  pavements.  The  Eden  Musee, 
that  paradise  for  youth  of  an  earlier  generation,  is 
vanished.  So  is  the  Fifth  Avenue  Hotel,  which  for 
forty  years  played  so  large  a  part  in  the  political  history 
of  the  town.  That  part  of  New  York  today  is  all  but 
dead — inside  of  twenty  years.  Some  day  hence  it  may 
be  reborn.  Such  things  have  come  to  pass  in  the  big 
town  ere  now. 

In  the  meantime  the  newest  New  York  has  come  into 
its  being.  The  construction  of  the  two  modern  railroad 
terminals — the  one  in  Thirty-third  Street  and  the  other 
in  Forty-second — has  created  in  the  district  that  lies 
between  them  what  today  would  seem  to  be  the  per- 
manent retail  shopping  center  of  the  city.  The  one 
station  brings  nearly  6o,OOO  folk — transients  and  com- 
muters— the  other  almost  100,000,  into  New  York  each 
business  day.  They  anchor  and  anchor  firmly,  its  new 
business  heart.  Its  sidewalks  are  daily  thronged.  As 
was  Twenty-third  Street  two  decades  ago,  so  has 


THE  MACY'S  OF  TODAY 

By    1903    the   new  Macy's   in   Herald   Square   wa»  finished   and  the 
business  going  forward  in  great  stride* 


The  Store  Treks  Uptown  83 

Thirty-fourth  become  today.  Not  only  the  railroad 
stations  but  four  great  subways  running  north  and 
south,  four  elevated  railways,  too,  a  dozen  surface-car 
lines,  and  innumerable  taxis  and  private  motor-cars 
pour  their  passengers  into  it.  It  is  a  thoroughfare  of 
surpassing  importance. 

Fifty  years  ago,  as  Rowland  H.  Macy  walked  home 
one  evening  with  his  daughter — as  was  his  frequent 
wont — from  the  simple  little  old  red-brick  store  in 
Fourteenth  Street  to  their  new  house  in  Forty-ninth, 
he  paused  for  a  moment  with  her  in  front  of  the  old 
Broadway  Tabernacle. 

"I  want  you  to  notice  this  corner,  very  carefully, 
Florence,"  said  he.  "A  half-century  hence  and  the 
business  of  New  York  is  to  be  centered  between 
Thirty-fourth  Street  and  Forty-second.  Here  is  to  be 
the  future  business  heart  of  this  wonderful  city." 

It  is  upon  the  vision  of  men  quite  as  much  as  upon 
their  prudence  that  the  success  of  their  enterprises 
depends. 


Today 


I.     A  Day  in  a  Great  Store 

THE  subtle  hour  which  in  summer  comes  just 
before  the  break  of  day  is  the  only  hour  in  which 
New  York  ever  sleeps;  if  indeed  the  modern  Bagdad 
ever  sleeps  at  all.  There  is  an  hour,  however — from 
three  of  the  morning  until  four — when  the  city  is  all 
but  stilled;  when  its  heart-beats  are  at  the  lowest  ebb 
of  the  twenty-four.  In  that  hour  even  Broadway  is 
nearly  deserted  and  Sixth  Avenue  and  Thirty-fourth 
Street  equally  emptied.  The  swinging  lights  of  a 
white-fronted  lunch-room  or  two;  the  echoing  racket 
of  an  extremely  occasional  surface-car  or  elevated  train; 
the  rush  of  a  "night-hawk"  taxi;  the  clatter  of  the 
milk-wagon;  the  measured  walk  of  a  policeman  and 
the  hurried  one  of  some  much  belated  suburbanite 
hurrying  toward  the  great  railroad  station  over  in 
Seventh  Avenue;  these  sounds,  occasional  and  unre- 
lated seemingly,  are  not  New  York;  not  at  least  the 
New  York  that  you  and  I  are  accustomed  to  knowing. 
Yet,  after  all,  they  are  New  York;  even,  if  you  please, 
the  New  York  of  that  throbbing  heart,  Herald  Square. 
Soon  after  four  in  the  morning  the  city  begins  to 
rise.  New  York's  heart-beat  is  quickening,  distinctly, 
even  though  ever  and  ever  so  slightly  at  the  beginning. 
Yet  the  activity  is  distinguishable.  The  policemen 
and  the  cabbies  in  the  square  realize  it,  so  do  the  waiter 

87 


88  The  Romance  of  a  Great  Store 

and  the  cook  in  the  Firefly  lunch  wagon  which  has 
stood  in  the  busy  Herald  Square  these  thirty  years  or 
more  now.  The  morning  papers  are  out.  The  news- 
paper wagons,  as  well  as  those  that  bring  milk  and  other 
comestibles,  begin  to  multiply.  The  earliest  workers 
in  the  heart  of  Manhattan  now  bestir  themselves. 
By  six  there  is  real  animation  in  the  broad  streets  in 
and  roundabout  Macy's.  By  seven  the  traffic  there 
begins  to  be  a  matter  of  reckoning.  A  traffic  policeman 
makes  his  appearance.  The  current  of  vehicles  and 
humans  in  those  thoroughfares  come  under  regulation. 
At  eight,  the  city  is  in  full  sway. 

All  this  while  Macy's  has  stood  dark — save  for  the 
few  yellow  and  red  lights  which  police  and  fire  pro- 
tection demand.  It  fronts  toward  Broadway  and  the 
side  streets  alike  are  cold,  impassive,  unanimated. 
Inside  the  great  dark  building  the  watchmen  are  on 
ceaseless  patrol.  There  are  miles  of  corridors  to  be 
paced — the  night  walking  of  the  Macy  watchmen 
would  reach  from  Dan  to  Beersheba  or  possibly  from 
New  York  to  Erie — millions  of  dollars  worth  of  stock 
and  fixtures  to  be  guarded.  A  diamond  ring  would  be 
missed}  and  so  would  a  spool  of  thread.  Nothing 
must  be  disturbed.  And  in  order  that  the  owners  of 
the  store  may  sleep  in  the  sound  assurance  that  nothing 
is  being  disturbed,  the  night  patrol  is  made  a  matter 
of  system  and  of  record.  Watchmen's  clocks,  here 
and  there  and  everywhere,  proclaim  the  regularity  of 
the  system.  And  an  occasional  surprise  test  now  and 
then  acclaims  its  thoroughness. 


A  Day  in  a  Great  Store  89 

Hours  before,  the  store  was  thoroughly  cleaned  j 
from  cellar  to  roof.  The  last  of  yesterday's  belated 
shoppers  was  hardly  out  of  this  market-place,  before 
the  men  of  the  cleaning  squads  were  in  upon  their 
heels.  What  a  mess  to  be  tidied  up!  Eight  and  one- 
half  hours  of  hard  endeavor  can  make  daily  a  mighty 
dirty  store  and  a  huge  housekeeping  job.  There  is 
at  the  best  a  vast  litter — and  yet  a  litter  that  cannot 
be  carelessly  thrust  away.  In  all  that  debris  there 
may  be  some  one  tiny  article  of  great  value — a  ring  or 
a  purse,  dropped  by  some  hasty  or  careless  shopper  or 
salesgirl.  It  all  must  be  carefully  gone  through  and 
in  the  morning  sent  to  the  Lost  and  Found  Department 
where  the  chances  are  that  it  will  not  remain  very  long 
before  having  a  claimant. 

Such  is  the  ordinary  routine  of  the  cleaning  squads. 
On  rainy  or  snowy  days  its  job  is  increased,  measurably. 
It  is  astonishing  the  amount  of  filth  the  sidewalks  of 
New  York  can  give  up  on  a  wet  day.  Yet  rain,  or  no 
rain,  filth  or  no  filth,  the  cleansing  must  be  thorough. 
The  store  at  eight  o'clock  of  the  next  morning  must  be 
as  clean  as  the  proverbial  pin.  An  earnest  of  which 
you  can  obtain  for  yourself  any  day  by  pressing  your 
nose,  among  the  first  of  the  impatient  early  shoppers, 
against  the  panes  of  the  public  entrance  doors. 
Through  the  night  these  toilers  work;  silently,  unseen, 
save  by  others  of  their  own  kind.  Far  below  them,  in 
the  cellars  of  the  great  structure  at  Thirty-fourth 
Street  and  Broadway,  there  are  other  squads  who  stand 
to  unending  tricks  at  the  boilers,  the  engines,  the 
dynamos  and  the  other  mechanical  appliances  of  the 


90  The  Romance  of  a  Great  Store 

organism.  The  fires  may  never  diej  the  lights  never 
go  out — not  even  from  one  year's  end  to  the  other. 
And  so  that  the  very  heart  and  blood  and  nerve-force 
of  Macy's  shall  in  truth  be  unending  there  are  engines 
and  boilers  and  dynamos  in  the  mechanical  plant  under 
the  Thirty-fourth  Street  sidewalks.  As  many  as  five 
hundred  tons  of  coal  can  be  housed  in  the  bunkers  hard 
at  hand.  The  entire  plant  could  easily  light  and  sup- 
ply the  other  necessary  electric  current  for  the  needs  of 
any  brisk  American  town  of  five  or  six  thousand  people. 

Eight  o'clock,  and  the  night  superintendent  of  the 
store  unlocks  the  first  of  its  outer  doors.  But  not  to 
the  public.  Mr.  Public's  hours  do  not  begin  until  a 
full  sixty  minutes  later.  First  the  store  must  be  made 
ready  for  his  coming.  It  is  not  enough  that  it  shall 
be  thoroughly  cleaned  in  every  fashion.  The  stock 
must  be  displayed  anewj  the  long  miles  of  dust  cover- 
ings lifted  off,  folded  and  put  away  until  the  coming 
of  another  evening.  Which  means,  of  course,  that  the 
store  folk  must  come  well  in  advance  of  its  patrons. 

In  the  half-hour  which  elapses  between  eight  and 
eight-thirty,  many  of  the  minor  executives — particu- 
larly those  of  the  selling  floors — make  their  appearance 
at  the  designated  doors  upon  the  side  streets.  In 
the  parlance  of  the  organization  these  are  known  as 
"specials"  and  are  divided  into  several  classes,  denoting 
chiefly  their  connection  with  its  selling  or  non-selling 
forces.  They  "sign  in"  their  arrival  upon  a  sheet.  For 
while  Macy's  is  known  as  the  department-store  without 
a  time-clock,  there  is  none  which  is  more  punctilious 


A  Day  in  a  Great  Store  91 

about  keeping  an  exact  record  of  the  comings  and  goings 
of  its  workers,  from  the  lowest  to  the  highest.  In  the 
entire  permanent  organization  of  more  than  five  thou- 
sand folk,  there  are  not  more  than  ten  or  a  dozen  who 
are  exempted  from  this  necessity.  A  man  may  draw  a 
twenty-thousand-dollar-a-year  salary  at  Macy's  and 
still  be  compelled  to  sign  his  time.  It  is  part  of  the 
inherent  democracy  of  the  organization  which  holds  as 
a  high  principle  that  what  is  fair  for  one  man  is  fair 
for  another.  A  better  bed-rock  principle  can  hardly 
be  imagined. 

Half  after  eight! 

A  bell  rings  somewhere.  The  time-lists  of  the  minor 
executives — perhaps  it  is  better  to  remember  them  as 
the  specials — are  closed,  and  new  ones  substituted. 
These  are  duplicates  of  the  earlier  ones.  When  the 
section  manager  (a  modern  and  much  better  name  for 
the  "floor-walker"  of  the  earlier  days)  signs  one  of 
these,  he  does  not  merely  put  down  an  "X"  as  before 
eight-thirty,  but  specifically  writes  down  his  arriving 
time. 

But  from  eight-thirty  to  eight-forty-five  is  known  to 
the  rank  and  file  of  the  organization  as  its  hour  for 
arrival.  Three  doors — one  in  Thirty-fourth  Street 
(for  the  women,  as  well  as  for  men  executives)  and  two 
others,  in  Thirty-fifth  Street  (for  the  other  men 
workers  and  the  junior  girls  respectively)  open  on  the 
precise  moment  of  the  half-hour.  Even  before  they 
swing  backward  upon  their  hinges  the  earliest  risers  of 
the  Macy  family  are  beginning  to  group  themselves  in 


92  The  Romance  of  a  Great  Store 

front  of  them.  They  go  tramping  up  the  broad  stairs 
together^  dropping  into  the  slender  receptacles  the 
individual  brass  checks  (of  which  much  more  a  little 
later)  at  the  first  barrier-gateway  j  after  which  they  go 
scurrying  off  to  the  locker-rooms,  before  descending  or 
ascending  to  their  various  posts  in  the  store. 

For  fifteen  minutes  this  rank  and  file — a  miniature 
army  it  is — comes  trooping  in.  There  is  no  time  to  be 
lostj  and  yet  no  unseemly  haste  or  confusion.  And 
no  noise.  Noise,  particularly  surplus  noise,  is  quite 
unnecessary  in  a  machine  which  is  functioning  well. 

At  eight-forty-five  the  barrier  at  the  head  of  the 
main  employees'  stair  at  Thirty-fourth  Street  closes. 
And  in  order  that  there  may  not  be  even  the  slightest 
particle  of  unfairness — one  gains  an  increasing  admira- 
tion for  the  absolute  impartiality  of  an  organization 
such  as  this — the  pressing  of  a  button  at  that  stairhead 
automatically  orders  closed  the  two  auxiliary  entrances 
in  Thirty-fifth.  And  yet,  in  order  perhaps  that 
perfectly  automatic  and  impartial  systems  may,  after 
all,  be  tinged  by  a  bit  of  human  sympathy  and  under- 
standing, eight-forty-five  is  forever  translated  at  the 
employees'  doors  as  eighty-forty-seven.  And  in  cases 
of  bad  weather,  hard  rain  or  snow  or  extreme  cold, 
eight-forty-seven  becomes  the  stroke  of  nine  by  the 
clock — in  very  extreme  cases  even  later,  with  a  special 
allowance  being  made  from  time  to  time  for  the  occa- 
sional breakdown  of  New  York's  rather  temperamental 
transportation  system. 

From  eight-forty-five  (eight-forty-seven)  to  nine 
o'clock,  the  late-comers — out  of  breath  as  a  rule  and 


A  Day  in  a  Great  Store  93 

extremely  embarrassed  into  the  bargain — are  herded 
into  a  special  group  and  given  special  "late"  passes, 
without  which  they  may  not  even  enter  the  locker 
rooms,  to  say  nothing  of  their  posts  in  the  store. 
Sometimes — when  the  tardiness  percentages  of  the 
store  have  been  running  to  unwonted  heights — the 
group  is  admonished  j  always  gently,  always  con- 
siderately. It  is  made  to  them  a  point  of  fairness, 
between  the  store  and  themselves.  And  almost  invari- 
ably the  admonition  is  received  in  the  spirit  in  which 
it  is  given.  In  other  days  it  was  quite  customary  for 
the  store  manager  or  one  of  his  several  assistants  to 
receive  these  late-comers  personally  and  individually 
and  talk  to  them,  heart-to-heart.  This  method  has 
now  been  entirely  abolished.  It  led  to  controversy. 
It  led  to  argument.  And  both  of  these  led  to  ill- 
feeling.  Macy's  will  not  tolerate  ill-feeling  between 
its  executives  and  its  rank  and  file.  Therefore,  any- 
thing that  might  even  tend  to  such  an  end  was 
abolished — completely  and  permanently. 

In  due  time,  and  when  we  are  studying  in  greater 
detail  the  Macy  family,  we  shall  come  again  to  the 
consideration  of  the  methods  of  checking  the  force  in 
in  the  morning  and  out  again  at  night — as  well  as  in 
and  out  at  different  intervals  throughout  the  day. 
Consider  now  that  it  is  still  lacking  a  few  brief  minutes 
of  nine  o'clock  on  a  workday  morning.  The  sales 
force  are  through  the  lockers  and  getting  to  their  day's 
work  upon  the  floor.  The  non-selling  forces  as  well — 
elevator-men,  cashiers,  all  the  rest  of  them,  are  at  their 


94  The  Romance  of  a  Great  Store 

posts.  A  doorman  is  told  off  to  each  of  the  public 
street  entrances  to  the  main  floor.  It  is  the  regular 
post  for  each  of  these.  He  goes  to  it  a  minute  or  two 
before  the  coming  of  nine. 

After  a  brief  period  of  busy  activity  the  store  aisles 
are  for  the  moment  practically  deserted  once  again. 
There  is  a  group  of  buyers  "signing  in" — once  again 
the  inevitable  time-list — at  the  superintendent's  office 
just  beneath  the  main  stair,  where  five  or  ten  minutes 
ago  the  "big  chief"  of  the  whole  main  floor  was  giving 
his  section  managers  their  special  instructions  for  the 
day.  The  rest  of  the  aisles  are  all  but  empty.  The 
clerks  are  behind  the  desks,  the  cashiers  at  their  posts, 
the  section  managers  at  attention,  the  elevators  banked 
and  waiting  at  the  ground  floor —  Then — 

Nine  o'clock! 

The  echo  of  Madison  Square  Mary  telling  the  hour 
comes  rolling  up  Broadway.  The  street  doors  swing 
openj  almost  as  if  working  upon  a  single  mechanism. 
The  first  of  the  shoppers  come  tumbling  in.  The 
great  main  aisle  of  the  store — one  thinks  of  it  almost 
as  the  Broadway  of  this  city  within  a  city — is  populated 
once  again.  The  chief  stream  of  the  store's  patrons 
pours  down  through  it.  Other  streams  from  the  doors 
in  the  side  streets  join  it;  still  others  diverge  down  the 
side  aisles,  up  the  stair  and  escalators,  into  the  elevators 
which  presently  go  packing  off,  one  by  one,  toward  the 
mysterious  and  fascinating  regions  of  the  upper  floors. 
In  three  or  four  brief  minutes  the  picture  that  one  has 
of  that  mighty  first  floor  from  the  mezzanine  balcony 
that  runs  roundabout  it  is  of  a  great  mass  of  hurry- 


A  Day  in  a  Great  Store  95 

ing,  scurrying  humanity ;  no  longer  any  well-defined 
currents,  but  little  eddies  and  pools  of  human  beings 
constantly  and  forever  changing. 

And  this  but  hardly  past  nine  o'clock  in  the  morning. 
In  another  hour  there  will  be  still  more  folk  within  the 
great  building.  Most  of  them  have  come  to  shop,  a 
few  of  them  to  take  a  tardy  breakfast  in  the  comfortable 
restaurant  upon  its  eighth  floor.  One  might  not  think 
that  it  would  pay  to  open  a  restaurant  for  breakfast  at 
as  late  an  hour  as  nine  in  the  morning,  but  such  a  one 
would  not  know  his  New  York.  Breakfast  in  our  big 
town  is  rarely  over  until  the  setting  of  the  sun. 

For  an  hour  at  the  beginning  of  the  day  the  Macy 
family  may  shop  in  its  own  interest.  The  sales- 
women— the  men  as  well — may  obtain  permits  from 
their  division  managers  which  in  turn  entitle  them  to 
large  and  conspicuous  shopping  cards  which  serve  two 
pretty  definite  purposes — the  identification  of  the  sales- 
woman as  an  actual  and  authorized  shopper  (she  is  not 
supposed  to  go  nosing  around  other  departments  merely 
in  her  own  interest  or  curiosity)  and  the  obtaining  for 
her  of  the  discount  to  which  she  is  entitled.  Macy's 
is  known  pretty  generally  as  a  store  of  no  special 
privileges  or  discounts.  Teachers,  clergymen,  profes- 
sional shoppers,  dressmakers  are  recognized  and  wel- 
comed in  the  big  store,  but  only  upon  the  same  terms 
as  every  other  sort  of  customer.  But  the  rule  bends, 
ever  and  ever  so  gently,  for  the  man  or  woman  who  is 
employed  within  it.  After  all,  he  or  she  is  a  part  of 
the  family  and  so  entitled  to  be  recognized.  This 


96  The  Romance  of  a  Great  Store 

recognition  takes  the  form  of  a  sizable  reduction  upon 
the  wearing  apparel  necessary  for  his  or  her  personal 
use.  This  difference  goes  upon  the  books  of  the  store 
as  a  business  expense. 

By  ten  the  store  has  finished  shopping  in  its  own 
behalf.  Its  maximum  force  for  the  day  is  on  the  job 
and  the  wise  shopper  comes  close  to  this  hour.  For 
by  eleven  the  force  is  reduced.  Luncheon  is  a  very 
simple  human  necessity  j  but  a  necessity,  nevertheless. 
And  New  York  has  never  countenanced  the  Parisian 
habit  of  locking  up  practically  all  shops  and  stores  and 
offices  for  an  hour  and  a  half  or  two  hours  in  the  middle 
of  the  day.  But  then  New  York  has  never  taken  its 
meal-times  quite  so  seriously  as  Paris.  Upon  this  one 
thing  alone  a  considerable  essay  might  be  written. 

But  New  York  must  lunch,  just  as  Paris  or  London 
or  any  other  community  must  lunch.  And  so  for  three 
valuable  hours  out  of  the  middle  of  the  day  the  Macy 
force  is  reduced  nearly  one-third  its  size.  Forty-five 
minutes  is  the  ordinary  allotment  for  lunch  and  the 
house  prefers  that  its  folk  shall  take  this  mid-day  meal 
underneath  its  roof.  Toward  this  end  it  has  made,  as 
we  shall  see,  elaborate  and  expensive  preparations  in 
the  form  of  elaborate  lunch-rooms  and  the  like. 
However,  it  recognizes  that  there  are  many  workers 
who  prefer  to  go  out  at  the  middle  of  the  day.  And 
proper  arrangements  are  made  for  the  accommodation 
of  these  folk. 

By  two  o'clock,  however,  practically  the  entire  selling 
force  at  least  is  back  again.  The  hardest  portion  of 


A  Day  in  a  Great  Store  97 

the  day  begins.  For,  no  matter  how  hard  the  store 
may  advertise,  no  matter  how  it  may  strive  to  educate 
its  patrons  in  every  other  way  to  the  use  of  its  facilities 
in  the  less  crowded  and  hence  more  comfortable  morn- 
ing hours,  the  hard  and  solemn  fact  remains  that  it 
suits  the  comfort  and  convenience  of  the  average  New 
York  woman  to  shop  in  the  afternoon.  And  shop  in 
the  afternoon  she  does.  She  comes  into  Macy's  right 
after  luncheon — although  a  single  glance  at  the  big 
and  crowded  restaurant  would  easily  convince  you  that 
she  often  lunches  as  well  as  shops  in  the  big  red-brick 
institution  of  Herald  Square — and  then  gets  right  down 
to  the  serious  business  of  shopping. 

And  at  Macy's  it  is  business;  always  business.  The 
big  store  at  Broadway  and  Thirty-fourth  Street,  in 
recent  years  at  least,  has  not  gone  in  for  shows — for 
organ  and  orchestral  concerts  or  recitals  or  anything  of 
that  sort.  It  has  considered  that  its  best  shows  are 
always  upon  its  counters.  It  has  had  no  quarrel  with 
the  successful  stores  that  have  added  entertainment 
features  to  the  other  routine  of  their  operations.  It 
merely  has  contended  that  its  own  method  was  com- 
pletely satisfactory  to  itself.  Which,  after  all,  is  a 
position  of  infinite  strength. 

"Macy's  attractions  are  its  prices!"  is  an  advertising 
slogan  of  the  house  so  long  sounded  now  that  it  has 
become  almost  a  household  phrase  to  its  hundreds 
of  thousands  of  regular  patrons.  It  is  a  phrase 
up  to  which  it  has  lived,  steadily  and  consistently. 
And  not  only  has  it  steadfastly  refused  to  give  shows 
of  any  sort — save,  of  course,  those  wonderful  window 


98  The  Romance  of  a  Great  Store 

pageants  of  other  years,  which  were  horses  of  quite  a 
different  color  indeed — but  it  has  also  refused  up  to 
the  present  time  to  install  such  non-merchandise  enter- 
prises as  manicuring  parlors,  hair-dressing  rooms, 
barber  shops  and  the  like.  And  this  despite  the  fact 
that  in  selling  such  things  as  groceries  and  automobile 
sundries — to  take  two  specific  instances  out  of  several — 
it  has  gone  considerably  beyond  the  merchandise  scope 
of  some  of  the  very  largest  of  its  New  York 
competitors. 

"Hundreds  of  thousands  of  regular  patrons?"  you 
interrupt  and  repeat.  "A  hundred  thousand  people  is 
a  whole  lot.  Until  very  recently,  at  least,  the  popula- 
tion of  what  would  be  considered  a  pretty  good-sized 
American  city." 

Not  long  ago,  I  asked  how  many  people  came  into 
Macy's  in  the  passing  of  an  average  business  day.  I 
was  promptly  told  that  several  times  the  firm  had 
endeavored  to  make  an  actual  and  systematic  count  of 
the  folk  who  passed  through  each  of  its  many  entrances, 
but  had  never  entirely  succeeded.  Once,  of  a  busy 
October  day,  the  count  up  to  two  o'clock  in  the  after- 
noon had  reached  and  passed  the  one  hundred  and 
twenty  thousand  mark.  At  that  time  each  of  the  great 
escalators  which  ascend  from  the  main  floor  was 
handling  its  maximum  capacity  of  7,400  persons  an 
hourj  each  of  the  fourteen  public  elevators  was  carry- 
ing the  full  number  of  passengers  permitted  it  by  law 
and  the  store  management;  while  a  host  of  other  folk 
were  doing  business  upon  the  ground  floor  without  ever 


A  Day  in  a  Great  Store  99 

ascending  to  the  fascinating  mysteries  of  the  land  of 
Up-Above. 

And  that  was  October.  If  a  man  who  had  seen  the 
throng  of  that  pleasant  autumn  day  and  thought  it 
well-nigh  impossible  only  had  returned  to  the  big 
store  on  a  December  day — say  the  Saturday  before 
Christmas  last — he  would  have  thought  that  three 
hundred  thousand  would  have  been  far  nearer  the 
mark  of  the  eight  and  one-half  hours.  Could  more 
folk  have  been  squeezed  through  those  wide  doors  and 
into  those  broad  aisles?  It  would  have  seemed  not. 
Even  with  the  aid  of  a  whole  corps  of  special  police- 
men and  traffic  rules  as  scientific  and  as  ingenious  as 
those  which  regulate  the  vehicular  traffic  of  nearby 
Fifth  Avenue,  it  was  a  task  of  a  good  half-hour  to  get 
within  the  huge  mart;  another  half -hour  to  get  out 
again.  Certain  departments — notably  toys — possessed 
navigation  problems  of  their  very  own,  and  other 
departments,  such  as  refrigerators  and  other  household 
goods,  were  comparatively  deserted.  The  Christmas 
trade  is  nothing  if  not  oddly  balanced. 

Through  a  store  such  as  this  one  may  wander,  ad 
libitum,  and  find  a  new  surprise  at  nearly  every  corner 
of  it.  Certainly  upon  each  of  its  floors.  Nor  are 
these  to  be  limited,  in  any  way,  to  the  floors  to  which 
the  public  is  ordinarily  admitted.  Once  I  remember 
coming  through  the  eighth  floor  and  suddenly  emerg- 
ing upon  a  clean,  crisply  lighted  little  workshop.  At  a 
long  bench  underneath  an  atelier-like  window  three 
men,  fairly  well-advanced  in  years,  were  working. 
One  was  engraving  upon  silver — the  other  two  upon 


IOO  The  Romance  of  a  Great  Store 

glass.  The  chief  of  the  shop  explained  to  me  that  in 
the  beginning  they  were  Germans  but  they  had  been  in 
Macy's  so  many,  many  years  that  they  were  today  to 
be  classed  as  pretty  thoroughly  Americanized.  One 
of  them  had  sat  at  that  bench — and  the  one  down  in 
Fourteenth  Street  that  had  preceded  it  before  the 
northward  trek  to  Thirty-fourth  Street — for  over 
thirty-two  years.  The  three  men  were  artisans — of  the 
old  school  and  of  a  sort  that  seemingly  is  not  bred  these 
days. 

"When  they  are  gone  I  do  not  know  where  we  shall 
go  to  replace  them,"  said  the  superintendent. 

"You  will  have  to  quit  doing  this  sort  of  work?"  I 
ventured. 

He  answered  quickly: 

"Oh  no,"  said  he,  "Macy's  never  quits.  We  shall 
have  to  find  others — even  if  we  train  them  ourselves. 
It  is  only  the  material  for  training  that  worries  me. 
American  young  men  of  today  are  not  overfond  of 
painstaking  work  of  this  sort." 

I  knew  instantly  what  he  meant.  As  a  nation  we 
are  made  up  of  "shortcut"  experts.  Perseverance, 
patience,  a  tedious  attention  to  uninteresting  detail, 
have  seemingly  but  little  appeal  to  the  average  young 
man  who  is  looking  forward  to  a  real  career  for  him- 
self. To  be  an  executive — no  matter  by  what  name 
or  title — and  in  as  short  a  time  as  is  humanly  possible 
is  apparently  the  only  object  that  he  sees  ahead  of  him. 
A  laudable  ambition  to  be  sure.  But  one  shudders  at 
the  mere  thought  of  a  land  which  should  be  composed 
entirely  of  executives  and  wishes  that  we  might 


A  Day  in  a  Great  Store  101 

develop  more  definitely  a  class  of  artisan  workers,  such 
as  came  to  us  forty,  thirty,  even  twenty-five  years  ago. 

The  oldest  of  these  men — the  man  with  thirty  Macy 
years  to  his  credit — was  chasing  a  hunting  scene  upon 
a  great  glass  bowl  as  I  bent  over  his  desk.  It  was  more 
than  artisanship,  that  taskj  it  was  artistry.  A  real 
work  of  real  art  even  though  at  the  moment  these 
elaborate  cut-glass  designs  have  lost  a  little  in  public 
favor.  In  their  own  time  and  order  they  will  come 
back  again,  however.  And  the  workmanship  that 
made  them  possible  will  be  restored  to  its  own  former 
high  favor. 

But  even  today  there  are  large  demands  in  Macy's 
for  precisely  this  sort  of  thing.  And  glass  grinding 
and  engraving — which  runs  all  the  way  from  the 
making  of  prescription  lenses  for  spectacles  or  for 
milady's  lorgnons  up  to  the  cutting  of  an  entire  dinner 
service  of  the  most  exquisitely  patterned  glass  or  repairs 
to  the  bowl  or  pitcher  that  Bridget  or  Selma  has  so 
carelessly  broken — is  the  chief  factor  of  a  shop  that 
handles,  as  other  parts  of  its  day's  job,  jewelry  and 
watch  repairs,  electro-plating  of  gold,  copper,  silver, 
nickel,  the  printing  or  engraving  or  stamping  of 
stationery  of  every  sort,  to  say  nothing  of  leather  goods 
of  every  kind  and  description  and  a  thousand  lesser  and 
highly  individual  jobs,  such  as  the  regilding  of  a  mirror 
or  the  transformation  of  an  ancient  whale-oil  lamp  into 
a  modern  incandescent  one.  It  is  small  wonder  that 
as  a  minimum  seventy-five  men  are  constantly  em- 
ployed in  this  shop;  more,  as  the  exigencies  of  this 
season  or  of  that  may  demand  them. 


IO2  The  Romance  of  a  Great  Store 

Yet  this  is  but  one  of  Macy's  shops  under  that  giant 
roof  of  Herald  Square.  There  are  others  in  close 
proximity — like  those  for  the  making  of  mattresses  and 
bedding  of  every  sort  and  variety  and  the  establishment 
which  brings  broken  toys  back  into  life  again.  To  my 
own  Peter  Pannish  soul  this  last  forever  has  the  great- 
est fascination.  Once,  long  years  ago,  I  went  into  a 
great  store  in  a  distant  city  and  found  up  under  its  roof 
a  man  whose  sole  task  from  one  year's  end  to  the  other 
was  the  making  of  repairs  upon  toy  locomotives.  How 
I  envied  that  man  his  job!  And  how  the  other  day  I 
envied  the  job  of  the  Macy  man  who  was  repainting 
dolls'  houses,  one  fascinating  suburban  villa  after 
another.  The  doctor  in  the  far  corner  of  the  room, 
whose  patients  ran  all  the  way  from  lovely  dolls  of  the 
most  delicate  china  and  porcelain  to  Teddy  Bears  who 
apparently  had  been  badly  worsted  in  some  terrific 
nursery  struggle,  was  a  man  with  a  position  in  which 
he  might  have  genuine  pride  j  but  for  the  painting  and 
re-arranging  of  those  small  houses  a  man,  with  an 
imagination  in  his  soul,  might  almost  afford  to  pay  for 
the  privilege  of  doing  the  work! 

Five-thirty! 

Again  the  doormen  to  their  posts,  two  or  three 
minutes  in  advance  of  the  exact  hour  set.  The  minute 
hand  upon  the  face  of  the  clock  no  sooner  reaches  the 
exact  bottom  of  its  course,  before  a  bell  rings  within 
the  store  and  the  great  doors  shut — simultaneously,  as 
in  the  morning  they  had  opened.  But  not  per- 
manently, of  course.  Dozens,  hundreds,  perhaps  a 


A  Day  in  a  Great  Store  103 

thousand  or  more  shoppers  still  are  left  within  the 
store.  Each  is  to  be  accorded  a  full  opportunity  to 
finish  his  or  her  transactions.  There  is  no  hurry j  no 
ostensible  hurry,  at  any  rate.  It  would  not  be  good- 
breeding  to  hasten  the  customer  upon  his  way.  And 
a  canon  of  good  merchandising  is  good  breeding. 

Gradually,  however,  the  late-stayers  eliminate  them- 
selves. The  big  doors  open  to  let  them  out,  but  never 
again  this  day  to  let  newcomers  in.  No  rule  of  the 
house  is  observed  more  inexorably.  And  so  gradually 
the  store  empties  itself. 

In  the  meantime  certain  departments  have  already 
ceased  to  function.  The  salesfolk  are  dismissed  for 
the  night  and  go  scurrying  off.  A  few  bring  out  the 
dust-covers  and  these  go  out  upon  the  stock.  Counters 
are  emptied.  The  stock,  wherever  possible,  is  put 
away,  and  when  not  put  away  is  carefully  covered. 
Nothing  is  left  to  chance  nor  to  dust.  System  reigns. 
And  the  section  manager,  the  last  to  leave  his  depart- 
ment for  the  night,  makes  sure  that  everything  there  is 
ship-shape  against  the  coming  of  another  day. 

Before  he  is  gone — and  he,  in  Macy's,  is  multiplied 
into  ninety  or  a  hundred  human  units — the  cleaning 
squads  are  out  upon  the  floor,  rolling  out  their  bin-like 
carts  in  orderly  formation  and  proceeding  upon  the 
debris  like  a  miniature  army.  Four,  five,  six  hours  of 
hard  work  await  them.  It  will  be  midnight,  perhaps 
later,  before  the  store  is  absolutely  clean  again  and 
settled  down  to  the  monotonous  presence  of  the  watch- 
man, to  await  the  arrival  of  another  dawn. 


IO4  The  Romatice  of  a  Great  Store 

In  the  meantime  the  Macy  family  is  pouring  forth 
into  the  side  streets  through  the  doorways  through 
which  they  entered  before  nine  of  the  morning.  There 
is  little  restriction,  no  red-tape  about  their  leaving. 
Their  brass  discs — each  individual  and  bearing  the 
employee's  designating  number — which  they  dropped 
in  the  morning  have  been  returned  to  them  in  the 
course  of  the  day  for  use  again  upon  the  morrow. 

The  only  formality  about  their  leaving — if  indeed 
it  might  be  called  a  formality — is  the  quick-fire  inspec- 
tion made  by  two  store  detectives  who  stand  either  side 
of  the  descending  file  at  the  main  employees'  stair,  to 
see  if  any  packages  which  are  being  carried  out  are 
lacking  the  check-room  stamp  and  vise. 

These  last  are  the  store's  protection  against  possible 
theft  through  its  inner  walls.  The  workers  who  bring 
packages  in,  either  in  the  morning  or  at  any  later  time 
in  the  progress  of  the  day,  are  asked  to  take  them  to  a 
well-equipped  check  and  storage  room  close  by  the 
lockers,  where  they  may  regain  them  at  night,  stamped 
and  vised,  to  go  out  into  the  open  once  again.  Any 
purchases  that  they  may  make  during  the  day  follow  a 
similar  course.  It  is  a  definite  and  an  orderly  pro- 
cedure. Any  other  would  be  indefinite  and  to  an  extent 
disorderly. 

This  is  the  reason  why  an  occasional  package — lack- 
ing the  official  stamp  and  vise  of  the  check-room — is 
picked  up  by  the  keen-eyed  detectives  while  its  trans- 
porter is  asked  to  tarry  for  a  moment  in  an  ante-room. 
In  the  course  of  an  average  evening  there  may  be  a  half 
dozen  of  such  outlaw  packages  detected.  Their  holders 


A  Day  in  a  Great  Store  105 

are  not  thieves.  There  is  not  even  the  implication  that 
they  are  thieves.  They  are  simply  trying  to  ignore  a 
fair  and  open-minded  rule  which  the  store  has  made, 
not  alone  for  its  own  protection  but  for  the  protection 
of  every  man  and  woman  in  its  employ.  Such  is  the 
explanation  which  the  assistant  store  manager  makes  to 
them  before  he  dismisses  them,  at  just  a  few  minutes 
before  six. 

"We  believe  in  explaining  things,"  he  will  tell  you 
afterwards.  "  For  we  believe  that  we  gain  the  very 
best  service  from  the  Macy  people  by  not  asking  them 
to  work  in  the  dark.  If  we  make  a  rule  and  its  rulings 
sometimes  puzzle  them — sometimes  even  seem  a  little 
arbitrary,  perhaps — we  tell  them  why  we  have  had  to 
make  the  rule  and  almost  invariably  find  them  satisfied 
and  quite  content." 

The  packages,  themselves,  are  detained  overnight. 
The  store  reserves  the  right  to  make  an  inspection  of 
them.  Such  inspection,  even  when  it  is  made,  rarely 
ever  shows  the  package  to  be  illicit.  It  merely  is  care- 
lessness. And  the  thoughtless  worker  to  whom  it  is 
returned  in  the  morning  is  merely  asked  not  to  be 
careless  again,  but  to  make  a  full  and  co-operative  use 
of  the  facilities  which  are  provided  for  the  comfort, 
and  the  protection,  of  him  and  his  fellows  j  which 
generally  is  all  that  is  necessary  to  be  said. 

By  six  the  store  is  practically  emptied  of  its  workers. 
After  that  hour  any  one  leaving  it  must  have  a  pass 
and  be  interviewed  by  the  night  superintendent  at  the 
single  door  left  open  for  exit.  Night  work  in  the 


io6  The  Romance  of  a  Great  Store 

Macy  store  is  little  and  far  between  these  days — save 
possibly  in  the  Christmas  season  and  even  then  it  is 
held  at  a  minimum  j  an  astonishing  minimum  when  one 
comes  to  compare  it  with  the  Christmas  seasons  of,  say, 
a  mere  twenty  years  ago.  The  state  law  says  that  aside 
from  that  fortnight  of  holiday  turmoil,  the  women 
workers  of  the  store,  who  are  considerably  in  the 
majority,  shall  not  work  more  than  fifty-four  hours  or 
oftener  than  one  night  a  week  and  then  not  later  than 
nine  o'clock.  In  turn,  the  store,  following  the  work- 
ings of  the  statute,  designates  Thursday  as  its  late 
employment  night.  If,  because  of  some  emergency,  it 
wishes  to  deviate  from  this,  it  must  have  a  special 
permit. 

As  a  matter  of  fact,  however,  Macy's  anticipates  the 
lawj  goes  far  ahead  of  it.  It  finds  its  women  workers 
not  only  willing  to  work  the  occasional  Thursday  night 
shifts,  but,  with  the  practical  advantages  of  a  full 
dinner  furnished  without  cost  and  overpay  to  come  into 
the  reckoning,  for  the  most  part  extremely  anxious. 
And  it  reminds  the  solicitous  legislators  up  at  Albany 
that  it  was  not  a  statute  that  abolished  the  pernicious 
habit  of  keeping  the  stores  open  for  business  evenings 
and  late  in  the  evening,  but  the  progressive  thought  of 
the  store  managers  of  New  York,  themselves.  These 
last  have  yielded  little  to  the  sentimentalists  in  real 
looking  forward.  Theirs  have  been  the  practical 
problems — not  the  least  of  these  that  of  the  education 
of  a  shopping  public  which  seemingly  had  demanded 
that  the  big  department-stores  of  New  York  should  be 
kept  open  evenings — some  evenings  throughout  the 


A  Day  in  a  Great  Store  107 

entire  year — and  all  evenings  in  a  certain  small  and 
terrible  season ;  and  without  consideration  of  the  task 
this  custom  imposed  upon  the  patient  folk  who  were 
serving  them.  Out  of  such  lack  of  consideration,  out  of 
such  selfishness,  if  you  please,  was  a  great  practical  and 
moral  reform  in  merchandising  evolved.  Which  was, 
in  itself,  no  little  triumph. 


II.     Organization    in    a    Modern 
Store 

I  LIKE  to  think  of  modern  business  as  a  huge,  great 
single  machine  j  or  better  still,  a  group  of  little 
machines  gathered  together  and  functioning  as  one.  It 
is  a  simile  that  I  have  used  time  and  time  again.  To 
feel  that  some  single  achievement  of  industry — of 
manufacturing  or  of  merchandising — is  as  well  organ- 
ized and  as  well  balanced  as  the  many  mechanisms  that 
are  laboring  in  its  behalf,  seems  to  bring  the  most  single 
complete  picture  of  modern  business  of  the  sort  that 
our  press  has  ofttimes  been  pleased  to  term  "big 
business." 

And  sometimes  I  like  to  think  of  these  "big  busi- 
nesses"— with  their  hundreds  and  thousands  of  human 
units — as  armies.  At  no  time  is  this  last  comparison 
more  apt  than  when  one  comes  to  apply  it  to  the 
modern  department-store,  as  we  today  know  it  in 
America.  For,  even  if  you  wish  to  grant  an  entire 
dissimilarity  of  purpose,  one  of  these  huge  institutions 
has  more  than  one  point  of  similarity  with  an  army. 
Not  alone  in  numbers  can  this  parallel  be  made,  but 
quite  as  quickly  in  organization.  While,  to  return  to 
our  first  simile,  it,  too,  is  a  big  machine — humanized. 
Its  parts  are  carefully  co-ordinated  so  that  the  whole 

109 


HO  The  Romance  of  a  Great  Store 

will  function  with  the  least  possible  friction.  Like  an 
army  it  is  officered  with  its  generalissimo,  its  under 
generals,  its  colonels,  its  captains,  its  lieutenants,  its 
sergeants  and  its  corporals.  The  difference  is  only  in 
nomenclature.  The  structure  is  quite  the  same.  For, 
when  you  come  to  analyze,  you  will  find  the  divisions 
of  labor  and  of  authority  quite  corresponding  to  similar 
divisions  in  the  army.  Officer,  "non-com"  and 
private — each  contributes  his  more  or  less  important 
part;  each  is  a  necessary  factor  in  the  success  of  the 
enterprise. 

Like  an  army,  the  department-store  of  modern 
America  is  designed  to  move  constantly  forward.  The 
"big-chief"  scans  his  balance  sheets,  the  rise  and  fall  of 
the  curves  of  his  outgo  and  income  averages,  the  tre- 
mendously meaningful  jagged  red  lines  of  his  graphic 
charts,  quite  as  carefully  as  the  army  general  keeps 
track  of  the  movement  of  his  forces  upon  the  maps 
which  his  topographists  send  him.  He  gathers  his 
officers  roundabout  him  and  plans  the  strategy  of  busi- 
ness with  the  same  shrewd  foresight  that  must  be 
observed  by  the  successful  military  leader.  He  must 
be  a  promoter  of  morale  throughout  his  forces,  even 
down  to  the  newest  and  the  lowest-paid  clerk.  There 
must  be  constant  liaison  between  the  general  and  the 
private  in  the  ranks. 

In  considerable  detail  this  parallel  can  be  carried  out. 
Soon,  however,  it  must  come  to  an  end.  That  is,  it 
ends  in  so  far  as  Macy's  is  concerned.  For  the  army  at 
Broadway  and  Thirty-fourth  Street  is  neither  an  army 


Organization  in  a  Modern  Store  in 

of  offense  nor  of  defense.  Its  sole  position  always  is 
upon  the  front  line  of  service. 

At  the  head  of  the  organization  there  are  the  three 
brother  partners  who  inherited  their  original  interest  in 
the  great  business  from  their  father,  the  late  Isidor 
Straus,  who,  with  their  mother,  lost  his  life  in  the 
supreme  catastrophe  of  the  sinking  of  the  Titanic.  In 
1914  they  acquired  Nathan  Straus*  interest  by  purchase. 
These  men,  Jesse  Isidor,  the  president,  Percy  S.,  the 
vice-president,  and  Herbert  N.,  the  secretary  and 
treasurer,  are  its  triple  head  and  front.  While  each 
has  trained  himself  to  be  a  merchandise  specialist  of  the 
highest  order,  there  is  none  that  knows  the  details  of 
Macy's  better  than  his  brothers — they  share  equally 
in  the  supreme  authority  that  directs  the  business. 
Directly  responsible  to  them,  in  turn,  is  its  general 
manager,  its  merchandise  council  and  its  advertising  and 
financial  departments. 

As  I  write  these  paragraphs,  the  great  chart  of  the 
Macy  organization  lies  upon  my  desk.  It  is  a  vast  and 
fascinating  thing.  With  the  lines  extending  upon  it 
here  and  there  and  everywhere  from  the  box  which 
holds  the  triple-head,  branching  and  rebranching  here 
and  there  and  again,  it  looks  not  unlike  a  giant  map; 
a  chart,  if  you  prefer  to  have  it  so.  And  so  it  is,  a  chart 
upon  which  the  steersmen  of  so  vast  and  so  responsible 
an  enterprise  safely  pick  their  course  upon  a  seemingly 
unending  journey. 

"Government  by  draughting-board,"  sniffed  an  old- 
time  business  man  to  me  once,  when  I  was  trying  to 
explain  to  him  in  some  detail  how  a  great  steel  manu- 


112  The  Romance  of  a  Great  Store 

facturing  plant   of  the   Middle   West   attempted  to 
accomplish  its  huge  job,  economically  and  efficiently, 
by  the  use  of  graphic  charts.     And  he  added:    "I'd  like 
to  see  myself  held  down  by  blue-print  authority." 
To  which,  after  all  this  while,  I  should  like  to  reply: 
"I  should  like  to  see  a  concern,  as  big  and  as  suc- 
cessful as  Macy's,  operated  without  a  careful  charting 
of  its  always  difficult  path." 

Yet,  as  a  matter  of  hard  fact,  Macy's,  any  more  than 
any  other  big  and  well-planned  business  organism  of 
today,  never  binds  itself  to  go  blindly  and  unthinkingly 
upon  the  lines  of  the  charts — and  nowhere  else.  The 
real  trick  of  executive  direction  seems  to  be  to  know 
when  to  follow  these  lines  and  when  more  or  less  to 
completely  disregard  them.  Rule-of-thumb  can  never 
again  overcome  the  rules  of  averages,  of  percentages 
or  of  economic  laws.  But  the  rule  of  wit  and  of  human 
understanding  can  ofttimes  be  used  to  temper  this  first 
group  and  sometimes  with  astonishingly  successful 
results. 

A.  glance  or  two  at  this  imposing  organization  chart 
lying  before  me  begins  to  show  the  many,  many 
ramifications  of  the  huge  Macy  business  tree.  It 
shows,  for  instance,  how,  under  the  direction  of  the 
merchandise  council,  are  four  large  branches  of  store 
activity  more  or  less  inter-related:  the  handling  of 
Macy's  own  merchandise  (meaning  particularly  that 
which  is  either  made  in  the  store's  own  factories  or  at 
least  made  under  its  direct  supervision);  the  work  of 
the  large  force  of  buyers;  the  comparison  department 


Organization  in  a  Modern  Store  113 

(an  important  phase  of  the  business  to  which  we  shall 
come  in  our  own  good  time)j  and  the  foreign  offices. 

In  the  financial  department,  the  controller  is  the 
quite  logical  chief.  His  general  duties  are  fairly 
obvious.  To  help  him  in  them,  he  has,  under  his 
direction,  the  chief  cashier,  the  salary  office,  the  audit- 
ing department,  the  depositors'  account  department — 
this  last  a  most  distinctive  Macy  feature — and  a  statisti- 
cal department. 

Obvious,  too,  is  the  greater  part  of  the  work  of  the 
publicity  department.  It  includes  in  addition  to  the 
advertising  manager — always  an  important  factor  in 
the  modern  department-store  and  particularly  so  in  the 
case  of  Macy's — a  display  manager.  It  is  the  job  of 
the  first  of  these  men  to  tell  the  public  of  the  mer- 
chandise being  offered  for  sale  at  the  sign  of  the  red 
star}  the  job  of  his  compeer  to  see  that  it  is  properly 
displayed  to  them. 

And,  finally,  there  is  the  general  manager — last  but 
not  least.  Connected  by  an  exceedingly  direct  and 
much-traveled  line  with  the  general  offices  upon  the 
seventh  floor  of  the  store  are  Mr.  W.  J.  Wells,  the 
store's  general  manager,  and  his  advisory  council. 
For  the  G.  M.,  big  as  he  is  always,  has  need  of  much 
advice.  Upon  his  broad  and  efficient  shoulders  are 
placed  such  a  tremendous  array  of  responsibilities  that 
one  cannot  but  marvel  at  the  sheer  efficiency  of  the 
man — to  say  nothing  of  his  reserves  of  physical  and 
mental  strength — who  can  hold  down  such  a  job.  Yet, 
at  Macy's,  the  man  himself  disclaims  any  superhuman 
powers. 


114  The  Romance  of  a  Great  Store 

"I  am  merely  the  automatic  governor  to  this  big 
machine,"  he  will  tell  you,  in  his  own  simple,  direct 
way.  "In  fact,  if  the  machine  always  functioned  one 
hundred  per  cent,  efficient,  there  really  would  be  no 
need  either  of  me  or  of  my  job.  It  is  because  no 
machine  that  is  built  of  human  cogs  and  cams  and  levers 
and  pulleys  may  ever  work  at  one  hundred  per  cent, 
efficiency  that  I,  or  some  other  man,  must  sit  in  this 
office.  It  is  our  job  to  meet  the  unusual  and  the 
unforeseen.  We  take  up  slack  here  and  loosen  there." 

The  translation  of  this  is  unmistakable.  If  the  three 
men  upon  the  high  seventh  floor  of  the  institution  are 
its  steersmen,  this  man,  who  has  his  office  at  the  rear 
of  its  broad  mezzanine  balcony,  is  at  least  its  chief 
engineer.  And  to  assist  him  he  has  five  assistant 
engineers — assistant  general  managers,  in  reality.  The 
habit  of  simile  leads  one  into  odd  designations  of  title. 
Each  of  these  five  assistant  general  managers — we  shall 
stand  by  the  nomenclature  of  the  store — in  turn  has  a 
large  number  of  departments  reporting  to  him.  While 
in  addition  to  them  and  ranking  as  virtual  assistant 
managers  are  the  superintendent  of  the  detective  bureau 
and  that  of  the  building,  itself. 

The  general  manager,  himself,  is  charged  with  the 
general  duty  of  engaging,  training  and  educating 
employees.  He  regulates  salaries.  He  controls  the 
transfer  and  discharge  of  employees.  He  is  charged 
with  the  enforcement  of  all  rules  and  regulations.  He 
is  the  final  authority  to  decide  whether  or  not  mer- 
chandise is  returnable,  for  refund,  exchange  or  credit. 
He  also  is  the  authority  who  adjusts  all  claims  or  con- 


WHERE  MILADY  OF  MANHATTAN  SHOPS 

The  vast  ground  floor  of  Macy's  is,  in  itself,  a  mark  of  much  interest 

and  variety 


Organization  in  a  Modern  Store  115 

troversies  with  customers.  And  he  is  the  one  to  whom 
employees  may  appeal  if  they  feel  they  are  being 
treated  unfairly  by  their  superiors.  A  man-sized  job 
truly!  And  because  no  one  man,  short  of  a  super- 
human at  any  rate,  could  ever  perform  all  of  its  various 
and  perplexing  functions,  Mr.  Wells  has  his  five 
assistants.  In  the  event  of  his  absence  as  well  as  that 
of  any  one  of  them  the  man  below  rises  temporarily 
into  his  immediate  superior's  job. 

It  is  the  major  task  of  the  first  of  these  assistants  to 
direct  the  work  of  the  floor  superintendents — eight  of 
these — and  through  them  that  of  the  section  managers 
and  the  actual  sales  forces;  nearly  two  thousand  people 
all  told.  In  other  words,  his  job  is  the  selling.  To 
this  great  force  and  to  the  countless  problems  that  must, 
arise  in  its  day-by-day  direction  there  is  added  the  over- 
sight of  the  personal  shoppers'  service.  Which  means 
in  turn  the  furnishing  of  guides  throughout  the  depart- 
ments to  shoppers  who  ask  for  them;  finding  translators 
for  folk  to  whom  the  intricacies  of  our  tongue  are 
unsolved  mysteries  and,  in  certain  specific  and  necessary 
cases,  the  sending  of  merchandise  with  a  member  of  the 
sales  force  into  the  homes  of  Macy's  patrons. 

The  second  and  the  third  assistant  managers  are  the 
heads  of  non-selling  organizations  within  the  store,  the 
fourth  and  the  fifth  handle  the  training  and  the  edu- 
cational departments,  respectively.  The  second  assist- 
ant has,  as  his  especial  responsibility,  the  merchandise 
checkers,  the  collectors,  the  stock  clerks,  the  cashiers 
and  the  interior  mail  and  messenger  service.  The 
other  non-selling  assistant  general  manager  supervises 


1 1 6  The  Romance  of  a  Great  Store 

the  receiving  department,  the  department  of  money 
orders  and  adjustments,  the  supply  department,  the 
delivery,  the  receiving,  the  time  office,  the  manufactur- 
ing, and  sundry  other  smaller  specialties  of  the  store  j 
small,  however,  only  in  a  comparative  sense.  Taken 
by  themselves  they  quickly  would  be  seen  to  be  sizable 
indeed. 

The  tasks  of  most  of  these  departments  are  fairly 
obvious  from  their  names.  Some  of  the  others  we 
shall  see  in  a  bit  of  detail  as  we  go  further  into  the  store 
and  its  workings.  In  other  chapters  we  shall  describe 
what  the  great  delivery  department  is  supposed  to 
accomplish,  and  actually  does  accomplish,  the  scope  and 
plan  and  reach  of  the  departments  of  training  and  of 
employment,  and  some  others,  too.  It  takes  no  great 
strain  upon  the  imagination  to  conceive  of  the  im- 
portance of  the  detective  bureau's  work,  nor  that  of  the 
superintendent  of  buildings. 

So  much,  then,  for  a  preliminary  bird's-eye  view  of  a 
mammoth  machine,  not  a  machine  for  turning  out  shoes 
or  typewriters  or  paper,  but  for  buying  and  selling  all 
these  things  and  many,  many  more.  And  as  you  read 
in  the  earlier  part  of  this  book,  the  huge  mechanism  did 
not  spring  into  its  being  in  a  year,  or  in  a  decade,  or 
even  in  a  generation.  It  represents  slow,  hard,  steady 
growth  j  and  slow,  hard,  steady  growth  it  is  still  having. 

There  are  now  one  hundred  and  eighteen  depart- 
ments in  Macy's  and  yet,  out  of  many  thousands  of 
separate  and  distinct  items,  there  are  some  things  that 
the  store  does  not  sell.  Some  of  these  commodities 
are  handled  by  other  great  department-stores.  But 


Organization  in  a  Modern  Store  117 

while  Macy's  may  and  does  follow  a  charted  path,  it 
is  its  own  chart  and  its  own  path.  It  never  follows 
blindly  the  pathways  of  others.  So,  for  instance,  it 
does  not  sell  pianos.  In  this  particular  case,  at  least, 
the  reason  is  not  hard  to  discover.  Remember,  all  the 
while,  that  Macy's  sells  for  cash  and  for  cash  alone — 
always  and  forever;  and  then  consider  that  in  ninety- 
nine  cases  out  of  a  hundred,  pianos  are  sold  upon  the 
installment  plan.  The  installment  plan  is  entirely 
outside  of  the  Macy  scheme  of  salesmanship.  It  may 
or  may  not  be  a  good  plan.  But  to  adopt  it  Macy's 
would  either  have  to  change  its  selling  policy  or  else 
dispose  of  so  few  pianos  that  it  would  not  be  profitable 
to  maintain  a  department  for  them.  This  is  the  alpha 
and  the  omega  of  the  piano,  as  far  as  Macy's  is  con- 
cerned. It  has  no  intention  either  of  changing  its 
deep-rooted  and  well-founded  selling  policy,  nor,  on 
the  other  hand,  of  establishing  a  little-used  and  possibly 
unprofitable  department.  Upon  this  decision  it  stands 
quite  content. 

Yet  assuredly  Macy's  is  organized  to  sell  nearly  all 
of  the  necessities  of  life — and  an  unusually  large  num- 
ber of  the  luxuries  in  addition.  From  hosiery  to  ice 
cream,  from  women's  suits  to  artists'  materials,  from 
eye-glasses  to  sausages,  and  from  petticoats  to  ukeleles, 
the  list  of  the  store's  wares  is  almost  without  limit. 
Other  furniture  is  not  hedged  about  by  the  same  mer- 
chandising traditions  and  restrictions  as  are  pianos  j 
there  are  in  the  upper  floor  of  this  great  market-place 
pieces  of  household  furnishings  whose  prices  run  well 
into  the  hundreds  and  even  thousands  of  dollars,  to. 


1 1 8  The  Romance  of  a  Great  Store 

say  nothing  of  rare  Oriental  rugs,  fine  paintings  and 
other  works  of  art. 

These  one  hundred  and  eighteen  departments  have 
been  arranged  after  long  study  and  experience  and  well 
thought  out  plans.  In  fact,  so  many  conflicting  and 
intricate  features  have  entered  into  their  planning  that 
it  is  hardly  possible  within  the  space  of  these  pages  to 
give  more  than  the  broad  general  policy  of  the  depart- 
ment organizations  of  the  store.  Yet  it  is  another  of 
these  fairly  obvious  principles  that  upon  its  main 
floor- — where  its  space,  square  foot  by  square  foot,  is 
by  far  at  its  highest  value,  and  where  there  is  a  maxi- 
mum of  accessibility — should  be  displayed  the  items 
that  sell  the  most  quickly  and  the  most  readily.  This 
follows  the  very  reasonable  theory  that  goods  for 
which  there  is  the  most  popular  demand  should  at  all 
times  be  the  most  accessible.  Varying  slightly  in 
specific  cases  and  conditions,  as  one  ascends  into  the  five 
upper  selling  floors  of  the  store,  the  merchandise  falls 
more  and  more  into  classifications  that  call  for  care  and 
deliberation  in  the  purchasing.  Thus,  upon  the  main 
floor,  one  will  find  such  articles  as  umbrellas,  books, 
candy,  notions,  and  the  like — to  make  but  a  few 
instances  out  of  many — while  upon  the  second,  there 
will  be  yardage  goods,  linens,  shoes  and  so  forth. 

Parenthetically,  it  may  be  set  down  that  in  older 
days,  yardage  goods — meaning  cloths  and  weaves  of 
almost  every  sort — never  used  to  be  found  above  the 
ground  floor  of  any  department-store.  Retail  mer- 
chandising tradition  in  New  York  suffered  a  body  blow 
some  years  ago  when  Macy's  sent  them  upstairs.  Even 


Organization  in  a  Modern  Store  119 

the  men  who  worked  in  the  department  protested 
against  the  change.  A  sizable  proportion  of  their 
income  was  and  is  in  their  commissions  upon  their  total 
volume  of  sales.  They  could  not  see  the  sales  upstairs. 

"For  two  cents  Pd  resign,"  said  one  of  the  veterans, 
just  as  the  change  was  announced. 

No  one  offered  him  the  two  cents,  however,  and  he 
remained.  And  the  following  year  saw  the  depart- 
ment reach  a  new  high  level  for  total  sales  in  its  yard 
goods. 

One  large  reason  for  this  in  Macy's  is  the  unusual 
accessibility  of  the  upper  floors  from  the  street  level. 
It  required  little  or  no  effort  for  the  customer  to  get  to 
the  second  floor,  or,  for  that  matter,  to  the  sixth.  The 
store's  unusual  and  fairly  marvelous  system  of 
escalators,  well-placed,  smooth  running,  always  avail- 
able, and  to  be  safely  used  by  even  a  rheumatic  or  a 
cripple,  bring  these  self-same  upper  floors  at  all  times 
within  easy  reach  of  the  street,  and  without  the  use  of 
the  firm's  generous  plant  of  elevators.  With  the 
exception  of  the  abnormal  stress  and  strain  of  the 
holiday  season,  the  vertical  system  of  Macy's  trans- 
portation is  never  very  seriously  taxed. 

To  those  upper  floors,  also,  go  the  folk  whose  pur- 
chases necessitate  the  fitting  of  something  or  other  to 
the  human  frame.  As  we  have  just  seen,  shoes  are 
upon  the  second  floor.  On  the  third  is  the  women's 
wearing  apparel,  with  special  dressing-room  facilities 
for  trying  on  and  fitting.  Similar  conveniences  are  to 
be  found  in  the  men's  clothing  department  upon  the 
fifth  floor. 


I2O  The  Romance  of  a  Great  Store 

Rugs,  upholstery  and  art  objects  generally  require 
more  time  for  selection  than  do  shoes  and  socks,  more 
room  for  display  as  well.  They  go,  then,  quite  nat- 
urally to  the  broad  spaces  of  the  fourth  floor.  The 
same  qualities,  only  somewhat  emphasized,  apply  to 
furniture,  which  is  shown  and  sold  upon  the  sixth. 
That  the  restaurant  is  relegated  to  the  eighth  floor  is 
due  in  large  part  to  the  necessity  for  having  cooking 
odors  where  they  can  be  carried  away  without  reaching 
other  parts  of  the  store  j  as  well  as  to  considerations  in 
regard  to  the  economy  of  floor  space  for  an  enterprise 
that  is  active  during  only  a  part  of  the  day. 

Minor  changes  in  the  arrangement  of  all  these  de- 
partments are  constantly  and  forever  under  way.  A 
great  market-place  like  Macy's  never  stays  entirely  put. 
Special  considerations,  special  problems,  unforeseen 
merchandising  plans  may  at  any  moment  make  it  not 
only  advisable  but  necessary  to  change  the  location  or 
the  relative  space  of  any  or  all  the  departments.  At 
Christmas-time  the  unusual  pressure  upon  some  of 
them,  accompanied  by  a  slacking  in  others — unfor- 
tunately (or  fortunately?)  shoppers  cannot  be  every- 
where and  at  the  same  moment — means  many  tem- 
porary changes — so  one  department  must  give  some  of 
its  space  for  a  time  to  its  neighbor — a  debt  possibly  to 
be  repaid  at  some  other  season  of  the  year,  when 
thoughts  are  not  on  toys,  or  candies  or  jewelry,  but 
upon  such  serious  things  as  carpets  or  refrigerators. 

An  interesting  sidelight  upon  the  intensive  study  that 
Macy's  gives  the  psychology  of  its  interior  arrange- 
ments is  furnished  in  the  fact  that,  on  the  theory  that 


Organization  in  a  Modern  Store  ill 

the  less  deadly  of  the  species  has  an  inherent  aversion 
to  department-stores,  men's  furnishing  goods  in  these 
emporiums  should  generally  be  displayed  upon  the 
main  floor,  and  just  as  close  to  a  street  entrance  as  is 
possible.  Macy's  has  been  no  exception  to  this  rule. 
A  man,  even  when  he  is  in  a  mood  for  spending,  wants 
it  over  with  as  soon  as  possible.  He  is  impatient  of  the 
slightest  delay.  On  the  other  hand,  his  wife  or 
daughter  will  make  of  shopping  a  kind  of  ritual.  And, 
perhaps,  because  of  that,  she  is  often  the  more  intelli- 
gent and  discriminating  buyer. 

Today,  however,  space  on  the  main  floor  of  the 
larger  stores  in  New  York  is  proving  so  valuable  for 
goods  that  appeal  to  women  shoppers,  that  some  of 
them  are  trying  to  find  a  new  method  of  appealing  to 
the  man-in-a-hurry.  And  so  there  has  come  to  be  a 
distinct  trend  toward  putting  men's  goods  upon  a  high 
upper  floor,  but  with  special  express  elevator  service,  so 
that  their  purchasers  can  get  in  and  out  with  a  minimum 
use  of  their  valuable  time. 

That  part  of  the  organization  of  Macy's  which 
always  has,  always  has  had,  and  always  will  have  the 
chief  visual  appeal  to  the  public,  is  the  staff  of  sales 
people  with  whom  it  comes  in  constant  contact.  Again 
and  again,  as  we  come  to  consider  the  minute  workings 
of  this  great  machine  of  modern  business,  we  shall  find 
its  human  factor  looming  larger  before  our  very  noses. 
We  can  not  dodge  it.  We  have  no  desire  to  dodge  it. 
In  fact,  we  find  it  at  all  times  the  most  fascinating 
feature  of  our  study.  It  is  no  part  of  this  narrative  to 


122  The  Romance  of  a  Great  Store 

decide  which  part  of  the  whole  corps  of  workers  in  the 
store  is  the  most  important  to  it — it  would  be  similar 
and  quite  as  easy  to  try  to  give  an  opinion  as  to  the 
relative  importance  of  the  mainspring  and  the  balance- 
wheel  of  a  watch — but  it  is  enough  to  say  here,  as  we 
shall  say  again  and  again,  that  the  girl  behind  the 
counter — to  say  nothing  of  the  man — is  an  absolutely 
indispensable  feature.  By  her  it  rises  j  by  her  it  might 
easily  come  tumbling  down. 

Let  me  illustrate  by  the  testimony  of  a  young  woman 
who  recently  was  a  girl  behind  the  counter  at  Macy's: 

"It  surely  is  true,"  she  says,  "that  we  salespeople 
can  do  a  great  deal  to  increase  the  business  and  the 
number  of  customers.  Some  of  these  last  are,  of 
course,  nearly  hopeless — they  would  try  the  patience 
of  Job,  himself — and  then  again  there  are  the  others 
who  are  most  appreciative  of  your  services.  It  was 
interesting  to  me,  when  first  I  went  behind  the  counter, 
to  see  how  many  of  my  customers  would  say  'thank 
you.'  I  found  that  nearly  all  of  them  will,  if  only  you 
make  a  real  effort  to  please  them.  And  the  majority 
of  the  Macy  salesforce  does  try  to  help  a  customer  in 
any  way  that  she  needs  help.  One  day  I  observed  this 
incident,  which  is  almost  typical:  A  customer  ap- 
proached our  counter  and  put  her  bag  down  upon  it. 
A  saleswoman  went  to  her  at  once,  saying: 

"'May  I  help  you,  madam?' 

"The  customer  shook  her  head,  a  negative;  she  was 
merely  trying  to  adjust  her  veil,  she  explained.  But 
our  saleswoman  was  resourceful  in  her  tact. 

"  'Well,  maybe,   I   can  assist  you  with   that,'  she 


Organization  in  a  Modern  Store  123 

insisted,  and  straightway  proceeded  to  do  so.  That 
was  her  notion  of  the  service  of  our  store." 

It  is  incidents  just  like  this — seemingly  small  when 
you  take  them  apart  and  place  them  out  by  themselves—  - 
but  in  the  aggregate  very  real  and  very  important,  that 
make  for  a  store  its  lifelong  customers.  Let  the  young 
woman  continue.  Like  a  good  many  other  young 
women  in  the  store  she  is  a  college  graduate  and  also 
possessed  of  a  power  for  shrewd  observation. 

".  .  .  One  woman  bought  some  gloves  from  me 
and  while  she  waited  for  her  change  showed  me  her 
shopping-list.  It  was  miles  long,  seemingly,  and 
appeared  to  include  everything  from  a  safety-pin  to  a 
toy  submarine.  As  she  conned  it,  she  said  that  she 
had  shopped  in  Macy's  for  years,  and  nowhere  else. 
In  fact,  I  remember  that  she  said  that  she  would  be 
completely  lost  in  any  other  store.  .  .  .  Others 
came  back,  bringing  a  single  glove  that  they  had  pur- 
chased a  year  or  more  before  and  wanting  another  pair 
just  like  them,  they  had  been  so  satisfactory.  .  .  . 

"Not  all  of  them  are  quite  so  cheery,  however. 
Occasionally  some  unreasonable  and  irate  customer 
would  appear,  storming  at  having  to  wait  a  few 
precious  moments  for  her  change,  or  at  not  being  able 
to  find  the  same  glove  that  her  friend  purchased  the 
week  before — the  chances  being  quite  good  that  her 
friend  might  have  bought  the  glove  in  another  store. 
These  are  the  times  that  test  the  wit  and  diplomacy  and 
resource  of  the  girl  behind  the  counter. 

"A  day  behind  a  counter  is  filled  to  the  brim  with 
experiences-~-you  have  your  finger  on  the  pulse  of  a 


124  The  Romance  of  a  Great  Store 

part  of  the  life  of  New  York — you  are  a  part  of  a  huge 
and  important  organization,  and  you  come  into  contact 
with  the  world  in  general.  Even  customers  coming 
to  our  glove  counter  furnished  us  with  interesting 
moments.  One  in  particular  came  to  me  to  get  some 
of  our  children's  woolen  gloves.  He  was  a  robust  old 
man — about  fifty-five,  I'd  have  said — but  he  told  me 
he  was  sixty-nine.  He  said  he  had  just  bought  the 
same  gloves  elsewhere  for  over  twice  as  much.  (I 
said  I  didn't  doubt  that  in  the  least.)  And  then  he 
went  on  to  say  his  wife  and  daughters  shopped  in  stores 
where  the  name  meant  a  great  deal,  but  that  he  always 
came  to  Macy's  because  he  came  for  the  merchandise 
he  got.  He  ended  by  saying  he  was  a  happy  man, 
with  three  romping  grandchildren,  that  he  daily 
handled  over  two  thousand  men,  but  couldn't  handle 
one  woman.  I  should  like  to  see  him  try  to  run 
Macy's  and  have  to  handle  some  six  thousand  men  and 
women." 

The  personnel  of  each  of  the  selling  floors  of  the 
store  is  under  the  direction  of  an  organization  captain, 
whose  precise  title  is  floor  superintendent.  He  has  an 
understudy — or,  as  he  is  known  in  the  parlance  of  the 
place,  a  relief — so  that  the  floor  is  never,  even  for  a 
minute,  without  an  executive  head. 

This  floor  superintendent  is  a  man  of  considerable 
discretionary  powers.  He  must  be.  These  powers 
are  being  constantly  brought  into  play  as  he  is  called 
upon  to  decide  the  merits  of  this  or  that  customer's 
claim.  He  is  a  man  of  tact  and  judgment,  both  of 


Organization  in  a  Modern  Store  125 

which  qualities  are  kept  in  constant  operation.  Upon 
his  floor  he  is  the  direct  representative  of  the  manage- 
ment and  so  looks  out  for  its  interests.  From  his  desk 
upon  the  floor  headquarters  he  directs  and  supervises, 
yet  he  constantly  circulates  throughout  his  various 
departments  and  sees  to  it  himself  that  the  matters  for 
which  he  is  responsible  are  thoroughly  carried  out. 
The  orderliness  of  the  floor  is  his  special  concern,  and 
when,  from  time  to  time,  it  becomes  necessary  to  shift 
salesclerks  from  one  department  to  another — as  in  the 
case  of  the  numberless  special  sales  requiring  extra 
help — it  is  he  who  engineers  the  details  of  the  transfer. 

Acting  as  lieutenants  to  the  floor  superintendents  are 
the  section  managers,  who,  as  we  have  already  seen, 
were  in  the  store  of  yesterday  known  as  "floorwalkers." 
But  in  the  Macy's  of  today  something  considerably 
different  is  meant  from  the  superannuated  and  some- 
what pompous  gentleman  who  used  to  condescend, 
when  we  asked  for  the  location  of  silverware,  to  wave 
us  away  with  a  cryptic  "second-aisle-to-the-right-rear- 
of-the-store."  It  now  means  a  live,  up-to-date,  agree- 
able gentleman,  with  a  man's-size  job  to  fill. 

Not  only  must  he  ascertain  the  customers'  needs  and 
direct  all  of  them,  plainly  and  courteously,  but  he  has 
direct  supervision  over  all  of  the  employees  within  his 
section.  He  is  held  responsible  for  their  deportment 
and  it  is  his  duty  to  observe,  as  far  as  possible,  their 
mental,  moral  and  physical  condition.  He  must  be 
able  to  detect  errors  in  the  methods  used  by  his  sales- 
clerks,  and  in  order  that  he  may  be  in  a  position  to  teach 
them  correct  methods,  he  must,  himself,  be  master  of 


126  The  Romance  of  a  Great  Store 

the  store  system.  Parts  of  this  constantly  are  being 
changed,  so  that  in  addition  to  all  of  these  other  quali- 
ties, the  successful  section  manager  must  possess  an 
alert  mind.  The  importance  of  his  work  may  be 
visualized  to  some  slight  extent  at  least  by  the  manual 
which  is  prepared  for  his  guidance.  This  is  a  loose- 
leaf  book  of  some  fifty  closely  printed  pages  j  the 
number  varying  according  to  the  changes  in  the  store 
system  which  are  made  from  time  to  time.  Just  to 
give  you  a  slight  idea  of  what  this  captain  of  a  mer- 
chandising army  has  upon  his  mind,  consider  that  under 
the  division  entitled  "Section  Managers'  Daily  Duties" 
there  are  forty-six  different  items,  and  under  "Miscel- 
laneous Duties"  thirteen.  Moreover,  he  must  have  at 
his  instant  command  all  the  technical  procedure  regard- 
ing transactions  and  forms,  refunds,  complaints,  trans- 
fers, employees'  shopping,  the  Internal  Revenue  Law, 
accidents,  and  then  some  more.  I  submit  this  as  a  job 
requiring  all  that  a  man  has  of  fortitude  and  delicacy! 

Salesmanship  is  the  thing  that  really  made  R.  H. 
Macy  &  Company  and  it  therefore  is  patent  that  they 
should  consider  the  actual  sellers  of  their  goods  as  the 
very  backbone  of  their  organization.  In  another 
place  it  is  related  how,  in  the  department  of  training, 
employees  are  taught  to  sell,  and  in  another  something 
of  the  working  out  of  the  psychology  of  the  customer 
and  the  salesclerk.  Education  counts.  It  helps  to 
make  the  salesclerk  a  vital  factor  of  the  store 
organization. 

Macy  policy  sees  to  it  that  the  clerk  is,  in  so  far  as  it 


Organization  in  a  Modern  Store  127 

is  possible,  kept  interested  in  his  or  her  work.  There 
are,  as  we  have  already  begun  to  understand,  as  few 
rules  governing  their  conduct,  dress  and  liberties  as  are 
consistent  with  the  smooth,  economical  operation  of  the 
business.  On  the  other  hand,  there  is  all  possible 
encouragement  for  them  to  become  familiar  and  even 
expert  with  the  things  that  they  sell.  In  many  of  the 
departments  special  booklets  have  been  prepared  as 
aids  in  selling  the  particular  line  of  merchandise  car- 
ried. That  for  the  stationery  department,  for  instance, 
covers:  Paper,  with  its  history  from  the  earliest  times, 
its  manufacture,  sizes  and  characteristics;  engraving, 
with  a  full  description  of  the  processes  connected  there- 
with j  fountain-pens  and  their  manufacture ;  desk  acces- 
sories, commercial  stationery  and  the  like.  Ambition 
to  excel  in  salesmanship  is  further  stimulated  by  taking 
clerks  through  factories  where  their  lines  are  made,  and 
by  exhibiting  motion  pictures  of  the  manufacturing  of 
these  goods. 

Here,  then,  is  the  store's  most  direct  contact  with  its 
patrons.  There  are  others,  however,  to  be  classed  as 
at  least  fairly  direct.  Take  that  big  and  comfortable 
restaurant  up  on  the  eighth  floor.  It  is  one  of  the  real 
landmark's  among  eating-places  of  New  York,  a  world 
city  of  good  eating. 

Its  own  magnitude  may  easily  be  guessed  from  the 
fact  that  in  a  single  business  day  it  feeds  more  people 
than  almost  if  not  any  other  in  the  town.  Translated 
into  cold  figures  this  means  that  there  is  an  average  of 
twenty-five  hundred  lunches  bought  by  customers  each 
day  that  the  store  is  openj  with  a  maximum  on 


128  The  Romance  of  a  Great  Store 

extremely  busy  days  reaching  as  high  as  five  thousand. 
Figures  are  impressive.  Yet  these  do  not  include 
either  afternoon  teas  or  late  breakfasts  for  both  of 
which  there  is  a  considerable  clientele. 

To  serve  these  hungry  folk  who  come  to  Macy's 
there  are  two  hundred  waitresses,  buss-boys  and  other 
employees  upon  the  floor,  besides  fifty  in  the  general 
kitchen,  twenty  in  the  bakery  and  eight  in  the  ice  cream 
factory.  And  if  you  still  try  to  doubt  that  this 
restaurant  is  not  of  itself  a  real  business  and  one  to  be 
reckoned  with,  consider  that  in  the  course  of  an  average 
year  its  patrons  consume — among  other  things — two 
thousand  barrels  of  flour,  fifty-two  tons  of  sugar,  seven 
hundred  and  fifty  thousand  eggs,  ninety-three  thousand 
six  hundred  pounds  of  butter,  two  thousand  bags  of 
potatoes,  and  nearly  half  a  million  quarts  of  ice  cream. 
This  latter  item,  however,  covers  the  ice  cream  used  at 
the  soda  fountain  and  in  the  employees'  and  men's  club 
restaurants. 

The  employees'  lunchroom — conducted  on  the  cafe- 
teria plan — serves  four  thousand  men  and  women  each 
working  day.  It  provides  tasty  and  wholesome  food 
at  a  cost  that  makes  it  entirely  possible  to  eat  to  reple- 
tion for  twenty  cents  or  less.  Soups,  for  instance,  are 
three  cents  a  portion,  and  meat  dishes  six,  while  other 
items,  such  as  sandwiches,  vegetables,  desserts  and  the 
like  are  correspondingly  low. 

Nor  is  this  luncheon  the  sole  restaurant  resource  of 
the  employees  within  this  institution.  In  the  men's 
club  nearly  a  thousand  more  of  the  Macy  family  eat 
their  midday  meal  each  dayj  and  eat  very  well  indeed. 


Organization  in  a  Modern  Store  129 

Here  the  meal  is  served  at  a  flat  rate:  at  the  uniform 
and  moderate  cost  of  thirty  cents. 

Under  the  same  general  management  direction  (the 
third  assistant  general  manager)  as  the  restaurant  is 
the  store's  supply  department — not  different  very  much 
from  the  supply  department  of  a  big  railroad  or  manu- 
facturing unit — which  supplies  everything  for  its  con- 
sumption, from  coal  to  string j  the  manufacturing 
departments  in  which  are  produced  glass,  mattresses, 
printing,  engraving,  custom-made  shirts,  millinery, 
picture  frames  and  paper  novelties  j  the  candy  factory 
over  near  Tenth  Avenue  and  Thirty-fifth  Street,  which 
completely  fills  a  big  modern  six-story  building  j  the 
telephone  service j  and  the  so-called  public  service 
department. 

These  last  facilities  command  our  attention  for  a 
passing  moment.  The  telephone  is,  of  course,  the 
nerve-system  of  the  Macy  organization  j  nothing  else. 
Its  chief  ganglion  is  a  far-reaching  switchboard  on 
which  little  lights  twinkle  on  and  off  and  at  which  at  a 
single  relay  sit  nine  competent  operators  in  addition  to 
a  corps  of  inspectors  and  supervisors.  The  big  board, 
from  which  run  fifty-nine  trunk-wires  to  the  neighbor- 
ing Fitzroy  exchange,  is  none  too  large.  Year  in  and 
year  out  it  handles  an  average  of  nine  thousand  calls  a 
day.  And  in  the  Christmas  season  this  number  easily 
is  doubled  and  trebled. 

The  public  service  department  means  exactly  what 
it  is  called.  It  is  at  the  service  of  the  public.  In 
concrete  form  it  is  a  free  information  bureau,  where 
theater  seats  and  railroad  and  Pullman  tickets  may  be 


130  The  Romance  of  a  Great  Store 

purchased  at  face  value — and  not  one  cent  beyond, 
not  even  the  usual  moderate  fifty-cent  advance  of 
the  hotel  agencies — where  astute  and  marvelously 
informed  young  men  and  women,  with  a  miniature 
library  of  reference  books  at  their  immediate  command, 
stand  ready  and  willing  to  answer  all  the  reasonable 
questions  that  may  be  thrust  at  them.  To  it  is  added  a 
postal  office,  a  telegraph  office  and  public  telephones 
for  both  local  and  long  distance  service. 

The  third  assistant  general  manager  of  the  store  also 
has  within  his  bailiwick  the  important  department  of 
mail  orders  and  adjustments.  Although  in  the  tech- 
nical sense  of  the  word  Macy's  today  has  no  mail  order 
department — having  been  forced  to  abandon  its  once 
promising  beginning  along  this  line  because  of  a  sheer 
lack  of  room  in  which  to  handle  it — the  store  each  year 
actually  receives  thousands  of  orders  for  its  goods  by 
mail,  from  folk  who,  for  one  reason  or  another,  find 
it  inconvenient  to  visit  it.  These  are  received  and 
systematically  handled  in  this  very  department.  Under 
its  adjustment  division  comes  the  extremely  interesting 
bureau  of  investigation,  which  concerns  itself  with  all 
complaints,  and  the  correspondence  bureau,  which 
handles  more  than  ninety-five  per  cent,  of  the  mail  of 
the  house. 

It  requires  no  particular  keenness  of  imagination  to 
see  that,  even  with  complaints  reduced  to  a  minimum 
and  letter-writing  and  handling  to  a  fine  science,  there 
is  an  infinite  amount  of  detail  in  these  two  departments 
alone — detail  that  reaches  into  every  part  of  the  store 


Organization  in  a  Modern  Store  131 

and  that  necessitates  a  clever  combination  of  system 
and  diplomacy. 

The  exposition  of  the  workings  of  the  Macy  organi- 
zation is  yet  to  lead  us  into  other  chapters  in  which 
various  separate  subjects  of  interest  will  be  treated  at 
greater  length  than  herej  but  now  is  the  time  and  place 
to  focus  our  attention  upon  one  of  the  small,  but 
extremely  important,  departments  that  works  unseen — 
but  not  unfelt — behind  the  scenes.  It  is  known  as  the 
comparison  department  and  the  work  that  it  does  is  of 
vast  importance  in  the  operation  of  the  store.  Its 
functions  are  unending — and  continuous.  Macy's 
policy  of  underselling  its  competitors  is  an  unhalting 
one. 

I  have  before  me  a  Macy  advertisement  from  a  New 
York  newspaper  of  recent  date.  In  a  conspicuous 
place  in  it  there  is  a  card  which  says:  "For  sixty-two 
years  we  have  sold  dependable  merchandise  at  lowest 
in  the  city  prices.  We  are  doing  so  now  and  shall 
continue  to  do  so."  This  was  published  at  a  time  when 
the  recent  reaction  from  the  extremely  high  prices  of 
the  war  period  already  had  begun  to  set  inj  and  yet 
this  was  the  big  store's  sole  acknowledgment  of  the 
deflation  sentiment — to  say  nothing  of  hysteria — whicH 
was  sweeping  the  town.  Its  competitors  had  been 
offering  their  wares  at  reductions  of  from  twenty  to 
fifty  per  cent,  from  their  topmost  prices,  but,  serene 
and  secure  in  the  knowledge  that  its  policy  in  selling 
had  been  consistently  adhered  to,  Macy's  only  reiterated 
that  its  prices  would  continue  to  be  the  lowest  in  the 
city — quality  for  quality. 


132  The  Romance  of  a  Great  Store 

To  hold  fast  to  this  policy,  through  thick  and  thin, 
has  not  always  been  easy.  Macy's  has  fought  some 
royal  battles  in  its  behalf — yet  not  so  much  because  it 
was  a  policy  as  because  with  the  big  store  in  Herald 
Square  it  has  become  a  principle  of  the  most  funda- 
mental sort. 

More  than  twenty  years  ago  the  principle  became 
extremely  difficult  to  maintain,  because  of  the  growing 
tendency  of  the  proprietors  of  articles,  so  patented  or 
copyrighted  as  to  make  their  imitation  practically  impos- 
sible, to  attempt  to  fix  their  final  retail  sales  price. 
It  no  longer  became  the  mere  question  of  whether 
Macy's  or  any  other  store  would  have  the  right  to 
undersell  its  competitors  j  it  became  the  fundamental 
question  of  whether  the  great  centuries-old  open  market 
of  the  world  could  continue  to  remain  an  open  market, 
in  the  interest  of  the  consumer}  and  not  a  closed 
market,  in  the  interest  of  the  producer.  To  maintain 
the  first  of  these  positions,  in  behalf  of  its  patrons, 
Macy's  entered  upon  and  won,  almost  single-handed, 
one  of  the  notable  legal  battles  in  the  history  of  this 
country. 

As  far  back  as  1901 — if  you  are  a  stickler  for  exact 
dates — this  whole  question  of  price  maintenance  became 
an  acute  issue  with  Macy's.  It  came  to  pass  that  when 
the  prominent  publishers  of  America  formed  an  asso- 
ciation, one  prime  purpose  of  which  was  to  fix  the 
prices  at  which  their  books  would  sell  at  retail,  the 
store  quickly  saw  that  if  this  trust  agreement  was  per- 
mitted to  stand  unchallenged,  its  cardinal  principle  of 
underselling  its  competitors,  would  have  to  be  sacrificed. 


Organization  in  a  Modern  Store  133 

Macy's  did  not  propose  to  make  such  a  sacrifice — to 
permit  its  customers  to  be  sacrificed — without  a  protest. 
And  such  a  protest  it  prepared  to  make. 

Isidor  Straus,  then  the  head  of  the  business,  sat  in 
the  office  of  his  friend  and  counsel,  Edmond  E.  Wise, 
in  a  downtown  office.  Mr.  Wise  put  the  thing  frankly 
and  without  equivocation  before  his  client.  He  said 
that  it  would  be  a  hard  legal  fight,  no  doubt  of  that, 
but  that  a  great  principle  was  at  stake  j  the  keen  mind 
of  the  lawyer  was  convinced  of  the  economic  fallacy  of 
the  position  of  the  publishers'  association. 

Quietly  Mr.  Straus  told  his  attorney  to  go  ahead. 
He  said  that  he  would  fight  the  fight,  to  the  last  ditch. 
No  expense  was  to  be  spared.  The  case  would  be 
carried,  if  necessary,  in  every  instance  to  the  highest 
court  of  appeal. 

Accordingly,  Mr.  Wise  prepared  a  suit  against  the 
American  Publishers'  Association  which  holds  the 
record  for  appeal  in  the  history  of  jurisprudence  in  this 
country.  Three  times  it  went  up  to  the  Court  of 
Appeals  of  the  State  of  New  York;  finally,  after  nine 
years  of  legal  battle,  it  was  carried  to  the  United  States 
Supreme  Court,  which,  after  due  deliberation,  decided 
every  point  in  favor  of  R.  H.  Macy  &  Company. 

That  was  in  December,  1913.  Early  in  the  follow- 
ing May  the  firm  had  the  satisfaction  of  having  the 
publishers  hand  over  a  check  on  the  Park  National 
Bank  for  $140,000.  This  sum  represented  a  settle- 
ment for  the  difficulties  that  Macy's  had  had  to 
undergo  for  more  than  a  dozen  years  past  in  get- 
ting stock  for  its  book  department.  Ofttimes  it  was 


134  The  Romance  of  a  Great  Store 

necessary  to  follow  devious  paths  indeed  to  gain  this 
end — and  still  hold  fast  to  the  fundamental  under- 
selling policy  of  the  store.  Sometimes  the  store  had 
to  go  so  far  as  to  send  to  other  retail  stores  to  buy  a 
certain  volume,  at  the  full  retail  price,  and  then  resell 
it  to  its  patrons,  at  its  customary  ten  per  cent,  off  the 
price  of  the  store  at  which  it  had  just  purchased  it. 
So  much  if  you  please  for  the  expense  of  standing  by  a 
principle! 

A  short  time  after  this  signal  victory  of  Macy's, 
certain  large  manufacturers  of  patented  articles,  who 
for  a  time  had  sustained  in  the  lower  courts  their  claim 
to  a  fixed  retail  price  standard,  sought  definitely  to 
control  Macy  retail  prices  upon  their  products.  Macy's, 
however,  defied  them,  and  the  Victor  Talking  Machine 
Company,  one  of  the  leading  adherents  of  price  main- 
tenance, brought  an  action  in  the  United  States  courts 
to  compel  Macy's  adherence  to  the  rules  for  resale  at 
a  certain  price.  Again  there  was  a  royal  battle  and 
again  Macy's  triumphed  signally,  for  on  final  appeal, 
the  United  States  Supreme  Court  again  decided  in  favor 
of  the  store  in  Herald  Square,  on  every  one  of  its  con- 
tentions. Macy's  then  retaliated  and  brought  suit 
against  the  Victor  Company,  under  the  Sherman  Law. 
In  a  bitterly  contested  action,  which  culminated  in  one 
of  the  longest  trials  before  a  jury  on  record — consum- 
ing more  than  ten  weeks — Macy's  recovered  a  judg- 
ment of  $150,000,  and  a  counsel  fee  of  $35,OOO; 
after  which  no  paths  apparently  were  left  open  to  the 
manufacturers  who  sought  to  maintain  the  retail  prices 


Organization  in  a  Modern  Store  135 

that  suited  them  best.  Court  decisions  seemingly 
blocked  all  possible  pathways. 

One  path  did  remain,  however — legislation.  Effort 
was  made  to  pass  a  measure  down  at  Washington  to 
permit  and  sustain  retail  price  maintenance,  which  in 
reality  meant  the  emasculation  of  the  Supreme  Court's 
decisions.  When  that  measure  came  to  a  hearing  before 
the  Interstate  Commerce  Committee  of  the  House  one 
of  the  Macy  partners,  accompanied  by  Mr.  Wise,  the 
store's  counsel,  and  Mr.  E.  A.  Filene,  the  well-known 
Boston  merchant,  came  before  it  in  opposition.  Up 
almost  to  that  hour,  Macy's  had  gone  it  alone.  Now 
the  attention  of  the  country  was  f  ocussed  upon  its  fight 
and  the  National  Retail  Dry  Goods  Association  came  in 
with  both  its  sympathy  and  its  active  co-operation — 
hence  the  appearance  of  Mr.  Filene,  who  made  a  most 
excellent  argument  in  support  of  the  Macy  contention. 

It  was  shown  definitely  to  the  members  of  this  House 
committee  that  many,  if  not  all,  branded  and  patented 
articles  took  a  retail  profit  of  from  fifty  to  seventy-five 
per  cent.  The  member  of  the  Macy  firm  took  a  watch 
nationally  advertised  at  $2.50  and  duplicated  it  with  a 
watch  which  his  store  sold  at  sixty-five  cents,  going  so 
far  as  to  take  the  two  watches  apart  so  as  to  show  con- 
clusively that  the  one  was  quite  as  good  as  the  other. 
Certain  other  commodities  went  under  similarly  critical 
analyses.  When  the  hearing  was  completed,  the  com- 
mittee laughed  the  bill  out  of  court.  Since  then  the 
question  of  price  maintenance  by  the  original  producer 
has  been  permitted  to  drop.  Macy's  had  won  its  hard- 
fought  fight}  won  it  cleanly  and  honestly.  By  per- 


136  The  Romance  of  a  Great  Store 

formance  it  had  made  good  its  statements  that  it  pro- 
posed wherever  it  was  humanly  possible  to  undersell 
its  competitors.  That  was  no  idle  phrase. 

It  is  indeed  one  thing  to  make  a  statement — whether 
in  print  or  by  word  of  mouth — and  another  and  oft- 
times  a  far  more  difficult  thing  to  make  good  that  state- 
ment by  performance.  No  one  knows  this  better  than 
Macy's.  Having  set  down  such  a  definite  and  distinct 
statement  it  must  be  prepared  to  make  good.  It  must 
be  so  covered  and  protected  at  every  possible  point  that 
if  challenged  it  can  give  a  good  account  of  itself.  In 
fact,  challenges  come  in  every  day — they  have  been 
coming  in  every  day  for  a  good  many  years  now — and 
the  house  continues  to  make  good  its  statement  will- 
ingly— even  joyfully.  Here  it  is,  then,  that  the 
comparison  department  f unctions ;  here  it  is  that  the 
original  fundamental  policy  of  Rowland  H.  Macy — to 
buy  and  sell  only  for  cash — strictly  adhered  to  during 
the  sixty-four  years'  life  of  the  business — makes  it 
possible  for  the  house  to  make  good. 

How,  then,  is  it  done? 

The  answer  is  easy. 

Suppose,  if  you  will,  that  Smith,  Brown  &  Jones  are 
having  a  special  sale  of  Mother  Hubbard  wrappers. 
There  are  advertised  as  their  regular  $4.97  stock, 
marked  down  (at  a  heartbreaking  sacrifice)  to  $3.79. 
Manifestly,  it  is  up  to  R.  H.  Macy  &  Company  to  sell 
the  same  quality  of  Mother  Hubbard  for  less  than 
$3.79,  if  they  are  to  live  up  to  their  oft-stated  policy. 
It  is  quite  as  patent  that  Macy's  must  know  just  what 


Organization  in  a  Modern  Store  137 

kind  of  wrappers  Smith,  Brown  &  Jones  are  selling,  if 
it  is  to  compete  on  an  exact  basis.  Nothing  simpler. 
One  of  the  Macy  staff  of  shoppers  is  hurried  forthwith 
to  the  scene  of  the  bargain  and,  purchasing  one  of  the 
garments,  brings  it  back  post-haste  to  the  Macy  com- 
parison department.  Furthermore,  it  is  in  this  depart- 
ment by  ten  o'clock  of  the  morning  of  the  sale.  It  is 
then  matched  as  closely  as  possible  with  a  Mother 
Hubbard  from  the  Macy  stock,  and  the  two  garments 
compared,  point  by  point.  If,  after  careful  examina- 
tion, it  is  found  that  Macy's  is  charging  more,  or  even 
the  same  price,  for  equal  quality,  then  its  prices  are 
immediately  marked  down  to  a  figure  at  least  six  per 
cent,  lower  than  that  advertised  by  the  other  store. 
And  this,  mind  you,  is  not  an  exceptional  performance 
but  a  daily  procedure  in  the  carrying  out  of  which  an 
exceptionally  alert  woman  manager  and  twenty  expert 
shoppers  are  constantly  kept  busy. 

If  you  make  inquiry  regarding  the  ins  and  outs  of 
this  remarkable  policy  you  will  find  that  it  is  far 
broader  than  you  may  have  imagined.  Here,  again,  is 
proof  of  the  pudding.  It  is  a  typical  letter,  received 
from  a  customer  and  copied  verbatim,  with  only  the 
name  left  out: 

November  12,  1920. 
R.  H.  Macy  &  Co., 

New  York  City. 
Dear  Sirs: 

I  purchased  a  banjo  clock  at  $13.89  from  you  on  Tuesday. 
Yesterday  I  saw  the  same  clock,  with  same  works,  etc.,  identical 

in  every  way,  at  's,  for  $11.25.     Now,  inasmuch  as  you 

claim  that  you  sell  goods  at  the  very  lowest  figure,  I  think  that 
is  too  much  difference  in  price  to  overlook.    I  trust  that  I  shall 


138  The  Romance  of  a  Great  Store 

receive  your  check  for  the  difference  in  the  amount,  otherwise 
please  call  for  the  clock  at  once.  I  purchased  clock  in  the 
basement 

Yours  very  truly, 


This  letter  was  received  by  the  store  and  acknowl- 
edged that  very  day.  It  then  was  turned  over  to  the 
comparison  department,  from  which  a  shopper  was 
despatched  to  the  store  at  which  the  customer  claimed 
to  have  seen  the  clock  for  less  money.  The  shopper 
reported  that  the  claim  was  correct,  and  a  check  was 
immediately  forwarded  to  the  customer  for  the  differ- 
ence between  the  price  which  she  paid  for  the  clock  and 
six  per  cent,  less  than  the  other  store's  price  for  it. 
Nor  did  the  matter  end  there.  All  this  kind  of  clocks 
in  the  basement  were  at  once  repriced  to  conform  to  the 
adjustment  made  with  the  customer. 

There  are,  too,  the  occasional  tests  made  by  customers 
who,  while  they  are  not  dissatisfied,  cannot  believe  that 
the  low-price  policy  can  be  consistently  carried  out. 
As  an  example,  this  half -jocular  letter: 

November  IS,  1920. 
R.  H.  Macy  &  Company, 

Broadway  &  34th  Street, 
New  York. 

Gentlemen : 

Lest  you  regard  this  as  a  complaint  from  an  ordinary  22 
calibre  chronic  kicker  let  me  say  in  the  first  place  that  I  merely 
want  to  see  to  what  extent  you  will  make  good  on  your  brazen 
claim  to  sell  goods  at  a  lower  price  than  other  stores.  Now  then : 

On  November  10th,  I  purchased  a  toy  "cash  register"  bank 
in  your  toy  department  for  $1.98.  (I  want  the  kid  to  leam 
frugality  better  than  I  did.)  On  November  14th  my  wife  saw 
the  same  toy  at  Hahne'i  in  Newark,  N.  J.,  for  exactly  the  same 


Organization  in  a  Modern  Store  139 

price.    So  far,  so  good.    It  was  worth  it.    But,  Mr.  Macy,  you 
said  your  prices  were  less. 

Besides,  I  have  an  account  at  Hahne's.  By  the  time  I 
would  have  needed  to  pay  for  that  bank  there  would  have  been 
enough  in  it  to  settle  the  bill. 

Here  is  your  chance,  but  I'm  from  Missouri. 

Yours, 


The  answer  to  this  complaint  was  prompt  and  to  the 
point.     I  treads: 

R.  H.  MACY  &  CO. 
HERALD  SQUARE,  NEW  YORK 

December  4,  1920. 
Mr.  


Dear  Sir: 

We  acknowledge  your  letter  of  November  24th,  with  regard 
to  a  toy-bank,  which  you  purchased  from  us  for  $1.98.  We 
have  investigated  your  complaint  and  find,  as  you  state, 
Hahne  &  Co.  in  Newark  are  selling  this  article  at  the  same  price 
at  which  you  purchased  it  from  us.  Our  price  on  these  banks  is 
now  $1.89,  in  keeping  with  our  claim  that  we  sell  dependable 
merchandise  for  "lowest-in-the-city"  prices. 

We  appreciate  your  courtesy  in  calling  this  matter  to  our 
attention  and  also  for  the  opportunity  to  demonstrate  the 
upholding  of  our  policy.  A  refund  of  nine  cents  in  stamps  is 
enclosed. 

Yours  very  truly, 
(Signed)       R.  H.  MACY  &  Co. 

Mgr. 

Bureau  of  Mail  Order  and  Adjustment. 

Of  course  this  complaint  was  trivial,  the  sum  in- 
volved small,  and  Macy's  must  quickly  have  realized 
that  the  man  who  wrote  the  letter  was  not  particularly 
serious.  Yet  that  made  no  difference.  The  matter 
was  adjusted;  even  though  the  process  of  adjustment 


140  The  Romance  of  a  Great  Store 

involved  a  shopper's  trip  to  Newark  and  considerable 
clerical  work — in  all  several  times  the  cost  of  the  tiny 
bank.  Yet  the  matter  was  adjusted  and  all  the  toy- 
banks  of  that  kind  were  at  once  reduced  in  price,  to  say 
nothing  of  a  satisfied  patron  made  for  the  store. 

There  is  another  sort  of  complaint  that,  at  times, 
keeps  the  comparison  department  pretty  busy.  Women 
frequently  will  stop  at  a  counter  in  the  store,  examine 
an  article  and  then  exclaim: 

"Hm-m — $6.74  for  that!  Why,  I  saw  the  same 
thing  today  at  Jinx,  Bobb  &  Company's  for  $5.90." 

A  mere  passing  comment  which,  in  the  old  days  of 
merchandising,  might  easily  have  been  ignored.  In 
Macy's  it  is  not  ignored.  The  clerk  who  hears  this 
remark  makes  a  note  of  it  and  sends  through  to  the 
comparison  department  what  is  technically  known  as  a 
customer's  complaint.  Immediate  investigation  is 
made,  the  prices  checked  up,  and,  if  the  casual  shopper 
is  right,  Macy's  prices  are  at  once  readjusted  to  the  six 
per  cent,  below  the  competitor's  charges.  It  has  been 
found,  however,  that  nearly  ninety  per  cent,  of  this 
sort  of  complaints  are  incorrect.  Two  articles,  in 
separate  stores,  may  look  so  nearly  alike  that  a  casual 
inspection  will  not  reveal  any  difference,  and,  therefore, 
competing  goods  must  often  be  subjected  to  expert 
examination  and  even  to  analysis.  A  magnifying  glass 
is  used  to  count  the  threads  in  a  fabric;  woolens  are 
boiled  in  chemical  solutions  to  determine  whether  there 
is  any  adulteration;  and  cotton  goods,  such  as  sheets 
and  pillow  cases,  are  weighed,  washed  and  weighed 


Organization  in  a  Modern  Store  14.1 

again  to  ascertain  to  what  extent  they  are  loaded.     For 
Macy's  is  just  to  itself,  as  well  as  to  the  public. 

As  has  been  indicated  already,  there  are  some  things 
that  the  store  as  a  matter  of  policy  does  not  sell — 
pianos,  chief  of  all.  But  that  does  not  mean  that  there 
is,  in  the  minds  of  its  managers,  the  slightest  excuse  for 
its  shelves  not  holding  the  things  that  it  ought  to  sell. 
A  large  difference,  this,  and  one  which  is  constantly 
being  checked  by  members  of  the  shopping  staff  of  the 
comparison  department — going  through  its  floors  and 
inquiring  in  the  various  departments  for  goods  for 
which  there  is  little  ordinary  demand,  and  so  a  con- 
siderable likelihood  of  their  not  being  found  in  stock. 
If  an  article  requested  is  not  found  in  stock,  the  shopper 
immediately  buys  something  else — so  as  to  get  the 
number  of  the  salesclerk.  Then  a  report  is  made  to 
the  department  buyer  in  order  that  he  may  see  whether 
or  not  the  clerk  has  followed  up  the  inquiry. 

Incidentally,  the  shopper's  report  upon  this  entire 
transaction  takes  into  account  all  the  details  regarding 
the  manner  in  which  the  sales  are  handled  and  even 
notes  the  speed  with  which  the  parcel  is  wrapped  and 
the  change  returned.  It  is  not  a  spying  system,  but 
part  of  the  store's  honest  effort  to  keep  its  efficiency  at 
the  highest  notch.  Naturally  the  shoppers  of  its  com- 
parison department  are  not  known  as  such  to  its  saleo- 
force — for  this  reason  the  personnel  of  the  corps  must 
be  under  constant  change — and  it  is  equally  evident 
that  their  anonymity  is  carefully  preserved  in  their 
dealings  with  other  stores.  They  are  all  well-bred 


142  The  Romance  of  a  Great  Store 

young  women,  ranging  in  type  from  the  flapper  to  the 
matron,  and  each  is  so  carefully  trained  to  act  her  part 
that  it  is  quite  impossible  to  distinguish  them  from  the 
store's  bona  fide  shoppers. 

Another  of  their  duties  is  to  report  upon  the  speed  of 
Macy  deliveries.  Once  a  month,  at  a  certain  pre- 
arranged time  of  day,  a  similar  purchase  is  made  at  each 
of  the  largest  stores  in  the  city,  including  Macy's. 
These  are  all  ordered  sent  to  the  same  address  and  a 
record  is  made  of  the  length  of  time  it  takes  each  to 
arrive.  In  the  report  that  is  finally  made  of  the  test 
details  are  included  showing  the  manner  in  which  all  the 
packages  are  wrapped  in  order  that  Macy  service  may 
at  all  times  be  held  up  at  least  to  the  standard  of  its 
competitors. 

In  the  highly  scientific  machine  of  modern  business, 
the  test  is  as  valuable  as  in  other  machines.  I  have 
stood  in  a  great  sugar  refinery  and  watched  the  work- 
men from  time  to  time  draw  off  tiny  phials  of  the 
sweetish  fluid  in  order  that  they  might  show  under 
laboratory  examination  that  the  machine  was  function- 
ing at  its  highest  point.  And  so  are  the  tiny  phials  of 
Macy  service  drawn  from  the  machine.  If  they  show 
that,  even  in  the  slightest  degree,  the  great  machine  of 
retail  merchandising  is  functioning  below  its  highest 
efficiency,  it  becomes  the  immediate  business  of  the 
management  to  correct  the  loss. 

"I  tell  my  people  not  to  come  to  me  with  reports  that 
everything  is  going  well,"  says  its  general  manager, 
"I  only  want  to  know  when  things  begin  to  slip.  Then 
it  is  my  job  to  set  them  straight  once  again." 


Organization  in  a  Modern  Store  143 

One  thing  more,  before  we  are  quite  done  with  this 
sketch  of  the  organization  of  a  great  merchandising 
institution.  It  is,  in  this  case,  a  most  important  thing: 

With  the  credit  system  in  force  in  nearly,  if  not 
quite,  every  other  large  store  in  the  New  York  metro- 
politan district,  Macy's  for  years  has  had  to  encounter 
a  considerable  sentiment  against  its  policy  of  doing  a 
cash  business  only.  For  there  always  has  been  a  desir- 
able class  of  trade  represented  by  customers  who,  for 
one  reason  or  another,  find  it  most  inconvenient  to  pay 
their  bills  monthly — people  whose  means  and  credit  are 
unimpeachable.  At  one  time  it  looked  as  if  R.  H. 
Macy  &  Company  would  either  have  to  forego  their 
custom  or  else  make  exceptions  to  their  long  established 
rule.  The  former  they  could  do;  the  latter  they 
would  not.  But — 

Out  of  this  very  need  for  furnishing  customers  with 
the  convenience  of  some  sort  of  a  charge  account  grew 
a  great  Macy  specialty — the  depositors'  account  depart- 
ment which,  while  making  no  concessions  to  the  store's 
rock-ribbed  principle  of  selling  for  cash,  solved  a  very 
great  problem  in  its  touch  with  its  public.  It  turned 
the  costly  credit  privilege  into  an  asset  both  for  the 
customer  and  for  the  store.  The  very  thought  was 
revolutionary!  What,  ask  a  customer  to  pay  in 
advance ;  to  have  money  on  deposit  with  R.  H.  Macy  & 
Company,  private  bankers,  to  pay  for  normal  purchases 
for  a  whole  thirty  days  to  come!  It  couldn't  be  done. 
New  York  would  never,  never  stand  for  it.  Every 
one  outside  of  the  store  was  sure  that  it  never  could  be 
done.  And  a  good  many  inside,  as  well.  Yet  the 


144  The  Romance  of  a  Great  Store 

thing  deemed  impossible  has  come  to  pass.  The  idea 
was  sound.  The  plan  today  is  successful,  even  beyond 
the  dreams  of  its  promoters.  With  fifteen  thousand 
depositors,  its  total  deposits — money  placed  into  the 
store  to  be  drawn  against  solely  for  merchandise  pur- 
chases— have  reached  as  high  as  $2,750,000  at  a  single 
time. 

Interest  at  four  per  cent,  annually  is  paid  upon  these 
deposits,  so  that  the  customer's  money  does  not  lie  idle 
in  the  Macy  till.  Moreover,  the  money  may  be  with- 
drawn at  any  time,  and  without  previous  notice  being 
given.  Further  than  this,  it  has  been  a  custom — not, 
however,  to  be  considered  invariable — to  pay  a  bonus 
of  two  per  cent,  on  net  sales  charged  to  the  depositors' 
account  department  throughout  the  year.  Compare 
the  thrill  of  receiving  a  bonus  check  from  your  depart- 
ment-store, instead  of  a  bill  for  dead  horses! 

It  has  been  estimated  that  in  some  of  New  York's 
most  representative  and  most  elegant  department-stores 
something  like  eighty-five  per  cent,  of  all  retail  trans- 
actions are  upon  the  credit  accounts.  Assuming  even 
that  all  of  these  accounts  are  promptly  collectible — or 
collectible  at  all — the  expense  of  the  machinery  of  their 
collection  becomes  no  small  item  in  store  management 
cost.  This  item  Macy's  saves — entirely  and  com- 
pletely. And  so,  to  no  small  extent,  the  store  justifies 
itself  in  that  other  rigid  rule — the  pricing  of  its  mer- 
chandise at  a  uniform  rating  of  six  per  cent,  less  than 
that  of  its  competitors.  Upon  this  thought,  alone,  a 
whole  book  might  be  written. 


III.     Buying  to  Sell 

UP  the  broad  valley  of  the  Euphrates  a  caravan 
comes  toiling  upon  its  way.  It  is  fearfully  hotj 
frightfully  dusty.  For  it  has  come  to  mid-September j 
the  rains  are  long  weeks  gonej  and  with  the  crops  har- 
vested, even  the  sails  of  the  great  mills  that  pump  the 
irrigation  canals  full  are  stilled.  The  time  of  great 
heat  and  of  little  work.  But  still  the  caravan — the 
long,  attenuated  file  of  horses  and  camels  must  press  on. 
Ahead  is  Bagdad,  that  self-same  ancient  Bagdad 
which  three  thousand  years  ago  was  the  commercial 
capital  of  the  world.  Through  the  heat  waves  and  the 
blinding  dust,  the  trained  eyes  of  the  Moslem  can  see 
the  sun  touching  the  gilded  minarets  and  towers  of  her 
great  mosques.  Bagdad  ahead.  And  at  Bagdad  the 
market-places  which  have  stood  unchanged  for  tens  of 
centuries.  Save  that  in  recent  years  there  have  come 
to  them  these  Americans — these  shrewd  agents  of  a 
little  known  folk,  these  rug-buyers  of  a  far-away  land 
of  which  they  spin  such  fascinating  tales.  Tales  far 
too  fascinating  ever  to  be  believable.  Yet  Allah  keeps 
his  own  accounting. 

In  the  foyer  of  a  lovely  new  home  in  newest  New 
York  a  Persian  rug  is  being  spread  for  the  first  time. 

145 


146  The  Romance  of  a  Great  Store 

Its  owner  dilates  with  pride  upon  his  purchase j  shows 
those  roundabout  him  the  symbolism  of  its  rarely 
delicate  design  j  even  to  the  tiny  fault  purposely  woven 
into  the  creation  by  its  maker  to  show  in  his  humble 
fashion  that  only  Allah  may  be  faultless. 

A  great  French  cityj  this  Lyons,  by  the  bank  of  the 
lovely  Rhone.  For  two  centuries  or  even  more  its 
tireless  looms  have  spun  the  rarest  silk  fabrics  of  the 
world.  Nearby  there  is  a  little  French  village.  Were 
I  to  put  its  name  upon  these  pages,  it  would  mean 
nothing  to  you.  Yet  out  from  it  there  comes  a  lace,  so 
rare,  so  delicate,  that  one  well  may  marvel  at  the  human 
patience  and  the  human  ingenuity  that  conceived  it. 
The  silk  comes  to  America,  straight  to  the  chief  city  of 
the  Americas  j  so  do  the  laces  j  and  so  in  a  short  time 
will  come  once  again  the  wondrous  cotton  weaves  of 
Lille  and  of  Cambrai — and  will  come  as  a  tragic  re- 
minder of  the  five  fearful  years  that  were. 

In  the  hot  depths  of  a  South  African  mine,  negroes, 
stripped  to  their  very  waists,  are  toiling  to  bring  forth 
the  rarest  precious  stones  that  the  world  has  ever 
known.  In  the  fearfully  cold  blasts  of  the  far  North, 
facing  monotonous  glaring  miles  of  lonely  ice  and 
snow,  trappers  are  after  the  seal  and  the  mink.  Why? 
In  order  that  milady,  of  New  York,  may  sweep  into 
her  red-lined  box  at  the  Opera,  a  queen  in  dress,  as  well 
as  in  looks  and  in  poise. 

From  the  mine  and  from  the  ice-floes  to  her  neck 
and  back  a  mighty  process  has  been  undergone.  The 


Buying  to  Sell  147 

great  multiplex  machine  of  merchandising  has  accom- 
plished the  process.  A  thousand  other  ones  as  well. 
Herald  Square  sits  not  alone  between  the  East  River 
and  the  North,  between  the  Battery  and  the  Harlem, 
between  five  populous  boroughs  of  the  great  New  York, 
not  alone  between  the  four  million  other  folk  who 
dwell  within  fifty  miles  of  her  ancient  City  Hall,  but 
between  the  shoe  factories  of  Lynn,  the  cotton  mills  of 
Lowell  and  of  the  Carolinas,  the  woolen  factories  of 
the  Scots  and  the  nearer  ones  of  Lawrence,  the  paper 
mills  of  the  Berkshires,  the  porcelain  kilns  of  Pennsyl- 
vania, between  a  thousand  other  manufacturing  indus- 
tries, both  very  great  and  very  small,  as  well.  Into 
Herald  Square — into  the  red-brick  edifice  upon  the 
westerly  side  of  Herald  Square  and  reaching  all  the 
way  on  Broadway  from  Thirty-fourth  to  Thirty-fifth 
Streets — all  of  these  pour  a  goodly  portion  of  their 
products.  In  turn,  these  are  poured  by  the  big  red- 
brick store  into  the  pockets  and  the  homes  of  its  tens 
of  thousands  of  patrons. 

A  mighty  business  this;  and,  as  we  shall  presently 
see,  a  business  made  up  of  many  little  businesses. 
Merchandising,  financing,  transportation  j  each  has 
played  its  own  great  part  in  the  bringing  of  that  silk 
sock  upon  your  foot  or  the  felt  that  you  wear  upon 
your  head.  Each  has  co-operated  j  each  has  correlated 
its  effort.  There  are  few  accidents  in  modern  business. 
Rule-o'-thumb  has  stepped  out  of  its  back-door.  In 
its  place  have  come  cool  calculation,  steady  planning, 
scientific  investigation.  If  modern  merchandising  has 
tricks,  these  are  they.  And  they  are  the  tricks  that  win. 


148  The  Romance  of  a  Great  Store 

In  our  last  chapter  we  pictured  R.  H.  Macy  & 
Company  as  a  machine  of  salesmanship.  Now  I  should 
like  to  change  the  film  upon  the  screen.  I  should  like 
to  show  you  Macy's  as  a  machine  of  buying.  Ob- 
viously one  cannot  sell,  without  first  buying.  Buying 
must  at  all  times  precede  selling,  while  to  meet  compe- 
tition and  still  sell  goods  at  a  profit,  the  keenest  sort  of 
shrewd  merchandising  must  be  used  in  purchasing. 
Your  buyer  must  be  no  less  a  salesman  than  he  who 
stands  behind  the  retail  counters  and,  what  is  more  to 
the  point,  he  must  constantly  keep  his  finger  upon  the 
pulse  of  the  market.  Which  means,  in  turn,  that  he 
must  not  for  a  day  or  an  hour  lose  his  touch  with  manu- 
facturing and  financial  conditions — to  say  nothing  of 
the  changeable  public  taste. 

For  the  one  hundred  and  eighteen  different  depart- 
ments of  the  Macy's  of  today  there  are  now  sixty-nine 
buyers;  the  majority  of  them  women.  This  last  is  not 
surprising  when  one  comes  to  consider  that  by  far  the 
larger  percentage  of  the  department-store's  customers 
are  of  the  gentler  sex.  Women  know  how  to  buy  for 
women — or  should  know.  How  foolish  indeed  would 
be  the  merchant  prince  of  the  New  York  of  this  day 
who  would  not  instantly  say  "yes"  to  the  assertion  that 
feminine  taste  in  buying  is  the  one  thing  with  which  his 
store  absolutely  could  not  dispense.  So  the  woman 
buyer  in  our  city  stores  is  so  much  an  accepted  fact  as  to 
call  today  for  little  special  comment,  save  possibly  to 
add  that  in  no  store  outside  of  Macy's  has  she  come 
more  completely  into  her  own.  The  buyer's  job 
covets  her.  And  she  covets  the  buyer's  job.  Well  she 


Buying  to  Sell  149 

may.  For  it  is  a  job  well  worth  coveting — in  inde- 
pendence, in  opportunity  and  in  salary. 

In  almost  every  case  a  buyer  comes  to  the  job  from 
retail  experience — although  occasionally  a  knowledge 
of  wholesale  selling  develops  the  required  skill.  In 
nine  cases  out  of  ten,  however,  he  or  she  rises  to  the 
important  little  office  on  the  seventh  floor  from  the 
salesforce  upon  the  retail  floors  beneath.  From  sales- 
clerk  he — or  as  we  have  just  learned,  usually  she — is 
promoted  to  "head  of  stock,"  which  is  the  title  of  the 
head  clerk  in  a  department  having  three  or  four  or 
more  clerks.  This  promotion  comes  from  a  superior 
knowledge  of  the  stock,  yet  not  from  that  alone:  the 
clerk  must  have  executive  ability.  An  agreeable  tem- 
perament is  also  a  necessary  ingredient  to  the  potion  of 
promotion. 

To  the  position  of  assistant  buyer  is  the  next  and 
logical  promotion  for  the  ambitious  and  successful 
"head  of  stock."  After  this  should  come  the  step  to 
the  big  job — which  steadily  grows  bigger — of  buyer, 
or  as  the  Macy  store  prefers  to  call  it,  department 
manager. 

Department  managers  do  no  actual  selling.  They 
now  have  graduated  from  that.  Yet  none  the  less  are 
they  salesmen — in  more  than  a  little  truth,  super- 
salesmen.  For  not  only  must  they  know  what  to  buy — 
and  how  to  buy  it  at  the  most  favorable  price — but  they 
are  equally  responsible  for  knowing  what  to  do  with 
their  purchases,  once  made.  They  are  the  merchants 
of  the  departments  j  accountable  for  the  salability  of 
their  stock.  It  is  very  much  their  concern  whether 


150  The  Romance  of  a  Great  Store 

those  departments  show  a  profit  or  a  loss.  Little  stores 
within  a  big  store.  A  big  store  made  up  of  more  than 
a  hundred  little  stores. 

As  we  have  seen,  it  is  not  an  uncommon  custom  for 
some  department-stores  to  rent  out  or  even  to  sell  the 
privilege  of  many,  if  not  all  of  its  little  stores. 
Macy's — in  recent  years  at  least — has  not  followed  this 
policy.  It  has  found  that  its  own  best  organization 
comes  from  keeping  the  department  as  a  unit;  a  pretty 
distinct  and  important  unit,  right  up  close  to  the  very 
top  of  the  business,  where  its  three  partners  are 
specialists  in  merchandising}  and  passing  proud  of  that. 

The  foundation  of  all  successful  buying  is  built  of 
the  bricks  of  sales  knowledge  laid  in  the  mortar  of  good 
judgment.  It  is  squared  up  by  a  sixth  sense  that  has 
no  name — yet  a  qualification  which,  by  its  presence  or 
its  absence,  makes  or  unmakes  a  buyer's  value.  In  its 
various  branches,  however,  this  unnamed  sense  is 
required,  to  a  varying  degree,  perhaps,  least  of  all  in 
the  purchasing  of  staple  goods. 

For  the  sake  of  a  more  convenient  understanding, 
let  us  begin  by  classifying  the  various  needs  of  the 
insatiable  Macy's  into  three  major  divisions:  We  shall 
put  down  staples,  as  the  first  of  these;  luxuries,  as  the 
second;  and  novelties,  as  the  third.  Under  staples  we 
shall  include  notions,  cotton  goods  (such  as  sheets, 
pillow-cases  and  muslins)  and,  in  general,  the  absolute 
necessities  of  life,  including  wearing  apparel  of  the 
commoner  varieties,  household  articles  and  the  like. 
These  are  in  constant  purchase  almost  every  day  of  the 


Buying  to  Sell  151 

year.  Take,  for  instance,  that  heterogeneous  collec- 
tion of  articles,  grouped  under  the  generic  and  whimsi- 
cal head  of  notions.  There  is  thread  of  all  kinds,  there 
are  hooks-and-eyes,  snap-fasteners,  hair-nets,  darners, 
button-hooks,  tape-measures  and  what  all  not  more — 
far  be  it  from  me  even  to  attempt  to  mention  the  more 
than  four  thousand  separate  items  that  must  be  con- 
stantly carried  in  the  notion  departments. 

For  all  of  these  there  is  a  huge  daily  demand,  while 
a  month's  supply  of  any  of  them  is  all  that  can,  as  a 
rule,  be  conveniently  handled  in  the  store.  It  must 
be  patent  that,  as  there  is  never  an  equal  demand  for 
these  small  but  essential  articles,  the  buyers  must  be 
placing  constant  orders  for  them.  So  it  is  with  every- 
thing else  that  people  must  have — irrespective  of  tastes, 
wealth  or  the  season  of  the  year — and  the  number  of 
the  list  is  legion. 

Therefore,  the  buyer  of  staples  does  not  depend  so 
much  upon  the  sixth  sense  as  upon  common  sense.  He 
must  have  plenty  for  the  latter,  however,  and  it  is  sure 
to  be  kept  working  on  a  fairly  even  basis  throughout 
the  entire  year. 

In  the  category  of  the  luxuries  are  included  such 
articles  as  jewelry,  musical  instruments,  Oriental  rugs, 
paintings,  fine  bric-a-brac  and  the  like.  Clearly  the 
buyer  in  this  branch  must  possess  real  taste  and  dis- 
crimination in  addition  to  commercial  ability,  in  order 
to  be  able  to  purvey  these  properly  to  the  public.  He 
handles  goods  which  have  to  be  bought  by  people  who 
have  already  purchased  the  necessities  of  life — the  buy- 
ing of  luxuries  involves  the  spending  of  the  public's 


152  The  Romance  of  a  Great  Store 

surplus  and  so  this  division  of  the  work  is  at  all  times 
attended  with  great  or  less  hazard. 

But  the  real  hazards,  the  real  necessity  for  that  sixth 
sense,  which  I  just  mentioned,  the  hardest  and  most 
nerve-racking  buyer's  job,  comes  in  the  purchase  of 
those  goods  grouped  under  the  common  title  of 
novelties.  As  one  of  the  members  of  the  Macy's 
merchandise  council  once  observed,  the  departments 
devoted  to  staples  sell  what  the  people  want,  while 
those  devoted  to  novelties  make  the  people  want  what 
they  have  to  sell.  And  this  last  is  quite  true  of  the 
luxuries,  as  well. 

Here,  incidentally,  is  a  very  curious  fact  about  mer- 
chandise: A  staple  is  not  a  constant  thing.  In  one 
department  it  is  what  everybody  wants  and  in  another 
it  becomes  a  novelty.  For  instance,  a  cotton  pillow- 
case selling  for,  let  us  say,  a  dollar,  is  a  staple  j  while 
another  pillow-case,  of  linen  this  time,  embroidered 
with  an  old  English  initial,  hand  hemstitched  and 
edged  with  lace — we  hesitate  to  guess  at  its  cost — is  a 
decided  novelty,  in  the  understanding  of  the  store,  at 
any  rate.  It  also  may  be  classed  as  a  luxury. 

Styles,  fads,  exclusive  designs  and  seasons  determine 
the  work  of  the  buyer  of  novelties.  The  job  is  one 
that  requires  quick  decisions.  The  staple  buyer  can 
"play  safe,"  but  the  buyer  of  novelties  who  pursued 
the  policy  soon  would  find  himself  in  the  rear  of  the 
procession.  Nor  can  he  afford  to  make  mistakes,  for 
they  may  be  costly  indeed  to  the  house  that  he  repre- 
sents. There  is,  in  consequence,  a  greater  demand  on 
his  nerve,  his  ingenuity  and  his  imagination  than  you 


Buying  to  Sell  153 

find  in  other  classes  of  buyers.  He  must  circulate 
where  there  are  people — at  the  theaters,  country  clubs, 
restaurants,  churches,  in  Fifth  Avenue — and  he  must 
keep  his  ear  to  the  ground  and  both  eyes  wide  open. 
Consequently,  when  it  is  reported  in  the  Sunday  paper 
that  the  women  of  Paris  have  taken  up  the  fad  of 
wearing  jeweled  nose-rings,  he  must  see  that  New 
York's  women  of  fashion  may  have  the  same  oppor- 
tunity of  expressing  their  individuality,  by  visiting 
Macy's  jewelry  department. 

This,  of  course,  is  rank  exaggeration,  but  it  indicates 
what  the  novelty  buyer  aims  at.  And  surprisingly 
often  he  hits  the  mark. 

In  such  a  huge  establishment  it  is  but  natural  that  the 
reception  hall  outside  the  buying  offices  should  be 
crowded  most  of  the  time.  Mahomet  oftimes  goes 
to  the  mountain — or  sends  a  representative  to  it  to  buy 
some  of  its  goods — yet  more  often  the  mountain  comes 
to  Mahomet.  And  so,  I  am  told,  for  five  days  a 
week — Saturdays  being  generally  recognized  as  a 
closed  day  for  buying — an  average  of  from  four  hun- 
dred to  six  hundred  and  fifty  salesmen  a  day  visit  the 
buying  headquarters  on  the  seventh  floor  of  the  store. 
Taking  into  consideration  the  fact  that  the  goods  pur- 
chased are  paid  for  in  cash  within  ten  days  of  their 
delivery,  these  headquarters  are  most  popular  with  the 
emissaries  of  manufacturers  and  wholesale  houses. 
Added  to  this  is  the  uniform  policy  of  courtesy  to 
salesmen,  which  has  been  stated  by  the  company  in  its 
precise  fashion: 


154  The  Romance  of  a  Great  Store 

"We  have  held,  as  far  as  within  our  power,  the  pre- 
cept of  which  our  late  head,  Isidor  Straus,  was  a  living 
personification — that  business  may  be  conducted  be- 
tween merchants  who  are  gentlemen,  in  a  manner 
profitable  to  both." 

It  is  one  thing  to  write  a  thing  of  this  sort.  It  is 
another  to  live  strictly  up  to  it,  day  in  and  day  out. 
But  that  Macy's  does  live  up  to  this  high-set  principle 
of  its  behind-the-scenes  conduct  is  evidenced  by  the 
unsought  testimony  of  a  manufacturer  who  sought  for 
the  first  time  to  do  business  with  it. 

This  man  had  made  one  of  the  mistakes  into  which 
all  manufacturers  are  apt  to  fall,  sooner  or  later.  He 
had  overproduced.  And  while,  heretofore,  his 
product  had  been  chiefly,  if  not  solely,  sold  in  high- 
priced  novelty  shops  he  now  needed  an  establishment 
of  great  turnover  to  help  him  out  in  his  dilemma. 
Macy's  came  at  once  into  his  mind.  The  old  house  is 
indeed  advertised  by  its  loving  friends.  He  went  to  it 
at  once;  by  means  of  the  special  elevator,  found  his 
way,  along  with  several  hundred  other  salesmen,  to  the 
sample  and  buying  rooms  upon  the  seventh  floor. 

A  young  woman  at  the  door  received  his  card  and, 
without  delay,  told  him  that  he  could  see  the  buyer  of 
the  department  which  would  naturally  handle  his 
product,  upon  the  morrow;  at  any  time  before  eleven, 
but  under  no  circumstances  later  than  noon.  Better 
still,  she  would  make  a  definite  appointment  for  him 
for  the  next  morning.  Mr.  Manufacturer  chose  this 
last  course.  And  at  the  very  moment  of  the  appointed 
time  was  ushered  into  the  buyer's  little  individual 


Buying  to  Sell  155 

room.  Contact  was  established  quickly.  The  buyer 
already  knew  of  Mr.  Manufacturer's  line,  regretted  that 
they  had  not  done  business  together  a  long  time  before. 
He  inspected  the  proffered  samples,  quickly  and  with 
a  shrewd  and  practiced  eyej  finally  called  into  the  little 
room  two  members  of  the  salesforce  from  the  depart- 
ment down  upon  the  ground  floor.  They  agreed  with 
him  as  to  the  salability  of  the  product.  He  turned 
toward  the  manufacturer. 

"Please  bring  your  stock  to  No.  —  Madison  Avenue 
next  Tuesday  afternoon,  at  half-past  two." 

Why  Madison  Avenue?  The  manufacturer  was  per- 
plexed as  he  descended  to  the  street  once  again.  The 
curiosity  was  relieved  on  Tuesday,  however,  when  he 
and  his  abundant  goods  were  ushered  into  a  big  and 
sunlit  room. 

"We  shall  not  be  subject  to  any  interruption  here," 
said  Macy's  buyer. 

And  so  they  were  not.  For  two  hours  the  buyer  and 
two  of  his  assistants  went  carefully  over  the  stock,  then 
withdrew  for  a  short  conference  amongst  themselves. 
When  they  returned  they  handed  Mr.  Manufacturer  a 
card.  It  read  after  this  fashion: 


CASH 

The  entire  lot 

$ 


156  The  Romance  of  a  Great  Store 

"The  figure  on  that  card,  with  the  word  'cash'  heavily 
underscored  was  just  one  hundred  dollars  in  excess  of 
my  minimum,"  said  the  manufacturer  afterwards,  in 
discussing  the  incident.  "I  paused  a  moment  and  then 
said:  'Gentlemen,  I  mean  to  accept  your  offer.  You 
have  figured  well,  as  your  offer  is  just  sufficient  to  buy 
the  goods.  R.  H.  Macy  &  Company  have  secured  this 
merchandise  of  unusual  quality  and  I  congratulate 
you.' " 

At  the  beginning  of  this  chapter  we  mentioned 
another  form  of  the  store's  buying — where  Mahomet 
goes  to  the  mountain.  This,  being  translated  into  plain 
English,  means  that  Macy's  must  and  does  maintain 
elaborate  permanent  office  organizations  in  Paris,  in 
London,  in  Belfast  and  in  Berlin.  These  in  turn  are 
but  centers  for  other  shopping  work — shopping  that 
may  lead,  as  we  have  already  seen,  as  far  as  the  distant 
Bagdad. 

For  instance,  from  his  office  in  the  Cite  Paradis  in 
Paris,  the  head  of  the  French-buying  organization  of 
the  store  controls  the  purchase  of  all  goods  for  it,  not 
only  in  France,  but  in  Belgium  and  Switzerland  as  well. 
He  virtually  combs  these  busy  and  ingenious  manufac- 
turing nations  for  their  latest  specialties;  from  France, 
les  derniers  cris  in  fashionable  gowns,  millinery,  per- 
fumes and  novelties  of  every  description;  from  Bel- 
gium, fine  laces  and  gloves;  and  from  Switzerland, 
watches.  These  items,  however,  are  merely  typical; 
there  are  hundreds  of  others. 

A  young  American  woman,  of  remarkable  taste  and 


Buying  to  Sell  157 

gifted  with  a  genuine  genius  for  buying,  is  upon  the 
Paris  staff  and  is  engaged  practically  the  entire  year 
round  in  visiting  exhibitions  of  every  sort  and  variety, 
in  hunting  the  retail  shops,  great  and  small,  of  the 
French  capital  and  at  all  times  acting  upon  her  own 
initiative  as  a  free-lance  buyer.  A  job  surely  to  be 
coveted  by  any  ambitious  young  woman  who  feels  that 
she  understands  and  can  translate  the  constantly  chang- 
ing tastes  of  her  countrywomen  into  the  merchandise 
needs  of  a  store  whose  chief  task  is  always  to  serve  them. 

For  reasons  that  are  not  necessary  to  be  set  down 
here,  the  Berlin  office  of  Macy's  has  been  in  statu  quo 
for  some  years  past,  although  it  is  just  now  reopening. 
The  London  branch  is  steadily  on  the  search  for  the 
clothing,  haberdashery  and  leather  specialties  which  are 
the  pride  of  the  British  workman,  while  from  right 
across  the  Irish  sea,  at  13  Donegal  Square,  North,  Bel- 
fast, come  the  fine  Irish  linens  that  so  long  have  been  a 
distinguished  merchandise  feature  of  the  store's  stock. 

So  it  is,  then,  that  forever  and  a  day,  Macy's  is 
engaged  in  bringing  the  cream  of  European  merchan- 
dise to  New  York — goods  of  nearly  every  kind  that  can 
either  be  made  better  abroad  or  cannot  be  duplicated  at 
all  in  this  country.  Importing  is  indeed  a  large  branch 
upon  the  Macy  tree. 

And  in  this  branch  romance  oftimes  dwelleth.  The 
picture  of  the  caravan  toiling  up  the  banks  of  the 
Euphrates  is  no  idle  dream  at  all.  Upon  the  world 
maps  of  the  merchandise  executives  of  Macy's  it  is 
an  outpost  of  trading  as  unsentimental  as  Lawrence, 
Massachusetts,  or  Norristown,  Pennsylvania.  Yet  the 


158  The  Romance  of  a  Great  Store 

buyer  who  goes  to  the  old  Bagdad  from  the  new  has 
a  real  task  set  for  him.  Obviously  he  must  not  only 
have  a  knowledge  of  his  market  and  a  keen  sense  of 
values,  but  he  must  also  be  a  resourceful  traveler}  a 
merchant  who  can  adapt  himself  to  the  ways  of  the 
people  with  whom  he  trades.  His  judgment,  discre- 
tion and  integrity  must  be  above  reproach,  for  often 
he  is  far  away  and  out  of  touch  with  headquarters  for 
long  months  at  a  time. 

Take  such  a  buying  trip  as  the  Oriental  rug-buyer  of 
Macy's  recently  made  into  the  Orient  and  back  again. 
It  lasted  eight  months.  In  that  time  he  traveled  more 
than  thirty  thousand  miles — by  steamship,  motor-car, 
railroad,  horseback  and  on  foot.  The  rug  region  of 
Persia  is  a  long  way,  indeed,  from  Broadway  and 
Thirty-fourth  Street  and  to  reach  it  he  went  to  London 
and  Paris,  then  to  Venice,  where  he  took  a  steamer  for 
Bombay,  upon  the  west  coast  of  India.  Thence  he 
proceeded  by  another  steamer  up  the  Persian  Gulf  to 
the  city  of  Basra,  which  is  at  the  confluence  of  those 
two  ancient  rivers,  the  Tigris  and  the  Euphrates — 
between  which  the  earliest  Biblical  history  is  supposed 
to  have  been  made.  Basra  today  is  one  of  the  world's 
great  rug-shipping  centers. 

Then  he  went  to  Bagdad  itself — the  fabled  city  of 
Haroun-el-Raschid  and  the  Arabian  Nights — from 
whence  he  started  into  the  very  heart  of  Persia.  He 
was  not  content,  however,  to  remain  idly  there  and  let 
the  rugs  be  brought  to  him.  He  went  much  further. 
Through  Kermanshah,  the  city  whose  name  is  given 
to  the  rugs  which  come  from  Kerman,  seven  hundred 


Buying  to  Sell  159 

miles  to  the  southeast,  to  Ramadan,  one  of  the  main 
marketing-centers  of  the  rug-producing  country — that, 
briefly,  was  the  beginning  of  his  itinerary.  He  went 
carefully  through  Persia,  picking  up  rugs  here  and 
there,  having  them  baled  and  sent  to  Bagdad  by  mules 
or  camels  and  shipped  thence  to  New  Yorkj  and  he 
established  warehouses  to  which  rug-dealers  brought 
their  wares.  The  light  of  the  Red  Star  shone  in  the 
East. 

Roads  in  Persia  leave  much  indeed  to  be  desired, 
and  as  the  chief  means  of  travel,  aside  from  beasts  of 
burden,  is  by  Ford  cars,  a  buyer  who  covers  much  of 
its  territory  has  a  rather  unenviable  job.  Gasoline  in 
those  parts  costs  four  dollars  a  gallon,  while  if  you  hire 
a  jitney  you  pay  for  it  at  the  rate  of  a  dollar  a  mile. 

On  his  return  trip  to  New  York  this  buyer  went 
back  once  again  to  India  and  north  as  far  as  the  border 
of  Afghanistan  to  investigate  the  condition  of  the  rug 
market  in  that  region.  At  ancient  Siringar,  in  the  Vale 
of  Cashmere,  he  bought  marvelous  felt  rugs  made  in 
the  mysterious  land  of  Thibet.  And  yet  all  the  way 
throughout  this  long  journey  he  was  buying  goods  for 
only  one  department  of  the  great  store  that  he  repre- 
sented. 

It  used  to  be  impressive  to  me  when  the  hardware 
dealer  of  the  small  town  in  which  I  was  reared  would 
boast  of  the  number  of  items  that  he  held  upon  the 
shelves  of  his  own  center  of  merchandising.  There 
were  more  than  two  thousand  of  them!  He  told  me 
that  with  such  an  evident  pride,  as  a  Chicago  man 


160  The  Romance  of  a  Great  Store 

speaks  of  the  population  of  his  town,  or  one  from 
Los  Angeles,  of  his  climate.  And  yet  such  a  stock  as 
that  wonderful  one  that  was  told  to  my  youthful  imag- 
ination, is  more  than  duplicated  in  Macy's — and  is  but 
one  of  one  hundred  and  seventeen  others.  And  the 
responsibility  of  buying  these  millions  of  articles  is 
scarcely  less  great  than  that  of  selling  them. 


IV.     Displaying  and  Selling  the 
Goods 

WITH  Macy's  goods  once  purchased,  the  next 
problem  becomes  that  of  their  transport  to 
the  store  in  Herald  Square.  Obviously  their  recep- 
tion must  rank  second  only  to  their  purchase.  And 
when  this  is  accomplished,  as  we  have  just  seen,  in 
every  corner  of  a  far-flung  world — Pennsylvania  and 
Massachusetts  and  Thibet  and  Korea  and  South  Africa, 
to  say  nothing  of  a  thousand  other  places — their 
orderly  receiving  becomes,  of  itself,  a  mechanism  of 
considerable  size.  Almost  equally  obvious  it  is,  too, 
that  the  store,  no  matter  how  carefully  and  fore- 
visionedly  and  scientifically  its  buyers  may  plan,  cannot 
always  dispose  of  its  merchandise  at  precisely  the  same 
rate  at  which  it  comes  underneath  its  roof.  It  cannot 
afford  to  gain  a  reputation  for  not  carrying  in  stock 
the  items  either  that  it  advertises  for  sale  or  that  it 
has  educated  its  patrons  to  expect  upon  its  counters. 
Which  means  that  alongside  of  and  interwined  with 
the  orderly  business  of  merchandise  reception  there 
must  be  warehousing — reservoir  facilities,  if  you  please. 
In  concrete  form,  these  last  of  Macy's  are  not  merely 
rooms  upon  the  extreme  upper  floors  on  the  main  store 
in  Herald  Square — a  space  which  in  recent  years,  how- 
ever, has  shrunk  to  proportionately  small  dimensions 

161 


1 62  The  Romance  of  a  Great  Store 

because  of  the  vast  growth  of  the  business  and  the 
increasing  demands  of  the  selling  departments  upon 
the  building — but  four  structures  entirely  outside  of 
the  parent  plant:  the  Tivoli  Building  on  the  north 
side  of  Thirty-fifth  Street,  just  west  of  Broadway 
(which,  as  we  saw  in  the  historical  section  of  this  book 
was  originally  the  notorious  music  hall  of  the  same 
name  until  Macy's  purchased  it  for  its  merchandising 
plans),  the  Hussey  Building,  in  the  same  street,  but 
just  west  of  the  store,  a  third  also  in  Thirty-fifth,  but 
close  to  Seventh  Avenue  and  a  fourth  in  Twenty-eighth 
Street  between  Seventh  and  Eighth  Avenues.  So  can 
a  great  store  spread  itself,  even  in  its  actual  physical 
structure,  far  beyond  the  bounds  that  even  the  most 
imaginative  of  its  customers  might  ordinarily  call  to 
mind. 

It  is  in  the  rear  of  the  selfsame  red-brick  building 
at  the  westerly  edge  of  Herald  Square — that  same 
main  structure  that  we  have  already  begun  to  study 
in  many  of  its  fascinating  details — that  we  find  the 
core  of  the  receiving  department  of  the  Macy  store. 
It  is  a  hollow  core.  A  tunnel-like  roadway,  two  hun- 
dred feet  in  length  bores  its  way  through  the  building, 
from  Thirty-fifth  Street  to  Thirty-fourth.  Through 
this  cavernous  place,  lighted  at  all  hours  by  numerous 
electric  arcs,  there  passes,  the  entire  working-day,  a 
seemingly  endless  procession  of  motor-trucks,  wagons 
and  other  carriers.  They  enter  at  the  north  end  and 
before  they  emerge  at  the  south  they  have  discharged 
their  cargoes.  A  corps  of  men  is  kept  constantly  busy, 


Displaying  and  Selling  the  Goods  1 63 

checking  off  the  merchandise  as  it  is  unloaded.  Husky 
porters,  with  hand  trucks,  seize  cases,  barrels  and  mis- 
cellaneous packages  of  every  sort  and,  presto!  they  are 
whirled  into  huge  freight  elevators  which  presently 
depart  for  upper  and  unknown  floors.  There  are  three 
of  these,  in  practically  continuous  operation.  In  addi- 
tion to  them  packages  brought  by  hand — generally 
from  local  wholesalers  and  in  response  to  emergency 
orders — are  carried  up  into  the  offices  of  the  receiving 
department  upon  an  endless  carrier. 

It  is  a  source  of  wonder  to  the  observer  to  see  the 
way  in  which  these  men  of  Macy's  work.  The  poise. 
The  confidence.  The  system.  It  is  terrifying  even 
to  think  of  the  mess  that  would  be  the  result  of  a  day, 
or  even  an  hour,  of  inexperience  or  carelessness.  In 
fact,  it  would  hardly  take  ten  minutes  so  to  jam  that 
long  receiving  platform  that  straightening  it  out  again 
would  be  a  matter  of  days.  But  upon  it  every  man 
knows  just  what  to  doj  and  every  man  does  it,  and 
does  it  fast.  And  system  wins  once  again.  It  gener- 
ally does  win. 

For  these  incoming  goods  receipts  are  made  out  in 
triplicate — one  for  the  controller,  one  as  a  record  for 
the  receiving  office  and  the  third  for  the  delivery  agent  j 
the  second  of  these  acts  as  a  sort  of  herald  of  the  actual 
arrival  of  the  merchandise  so  that  within  sixty  seconds 
or  thereabouts  of  the  actual  appearance  of  the  goods 
under  the  house's  main  roof  the  man  who  is  responsible 
for  them  may  be  advised. 

Every  article  purchased  anywhere  by  R.  H.  Macy 
&  Company,  either  for  their  own  use  or  for  resale,  is 


164  The  Romance  of  a  Great  Store 

received  through  this  department,  although  there  are 
a  few  other  points  than  the  tunnel-like  interior  street 
from  Thirty-fourth  Street  to  Thirty-fifth  where  they 
are  received.  The  four  warehouses  that  we  have  just 
seen  have  their  individual  receiving  facilities:  the  coal 
that  goes  to  heat  and  light  and  drive  the  big  main 
building  is  poured  through  chutes  under  the  Thirty- 
fourth  Street  pavement,  while  direct  to  the  company's 
stables  and  garages  go  the  fodder  for  its  vehicles — hay 
for  the  horses  of  flesh  and  blood,  and  gasoline  and  oil 
for  those  of  steel  and  ironj  all  the  other  miniature 
mountains  of  their  incidental  materials  into  the  bargain. 
But  even  these  are  checked  in  at  the  main  receiving 
department  j  and  triplicate  receipts  issued  upon  their 
arrival. 

So,  then,  come  in  these  goods — by  hand,  express,  by 
parcel  post  and  freight.  The  most  of  them  have  had 
their  transport  charges  prepaid  j  a  certain  small  pro- 
portion of  them  comes  marked  "collect."  An  especial 
provision  must  be  made  for  the  cash  payment  of  these 
charges.  The  big  machine  of  modern  industry  must 
indeed  have  many  odd  cams  and  levers  adjusted  to  it. 
It  must  be  designed  not  alone  for  the  usual,  but  for 
the  unusual,  and  in  a  multitude  of  ways. 

These,  then,  are  the  reception  chutes  of  the  Macy 
machine  j  the  porters,  who  even  while  hastening  their 
trucks  toward  the  elevators  are  making  a  cursory  exam- 
ination of  the  arrival  condition  of  the  merchandise,  are 
in  themselves  small  automatic  arms  of  inspection.  For 
while  some  of  these  packages  have  come  from  nearby 


Displaying  and  Selling  the  Goods  165 

— perhaps  not  half  a  block  distant — others  will  have 
come  from  halfway  around  the  wide  world.  And  the 
possibility  of  damage  to  the  contents  of  the  carrier  is 
lurking  always  in  the  short-distance  package,  quite  as 
much  as  in  its  brother,  that  has  attained  the  distinction 
of  being  a  globe-trotter.  The  crates  from  the  Middle 
West,  those  stout  and  honest  looking  Yankee  boxes 
from  New  England,  this  group  of  barrels  from  the 
heart  of  new  Czecho-Slovakia,  and  that  of  zinc-lined 
cases  from  France — the  Lorraine  has  touched  at  her 
North  River  pier  but  two  or  three  days  since — those 
great  bales  and  bundles  from  the  Orient,  with  the  seem- 
ingly meaningless  (and  extremely  meaningful)  symbols 
splashed  upon  their  rough  sides,  all  look  sturdy 
enough,  as  if  they  had  survived  well  the  vicissitudes  of 
modern  travel.  Yet  one  can  never  tell. 

Which  means  that  the  personnel  of  the  order  check- 
ing department  up  on  the  seventh  floor  must  not  only 
carefully  verify  the  shipment  as  to  quality  and  to  price 
but  as  to  the  condition  in  which  it  actually  is  received. 
The  hurried  cursory  examination  of  the  platform 
porters  becomes  an  unhurried  and  painstaking  investi- 
gation in  this  last  instance.  The  cases  are  not  neces- 
sarily opened  within  the  seventh  floor  headquarters  of 
the  order  checking  department.  As  in  the  case  of  the 
actual  physical  receipt,  the  unpacking  is  carried  forward 
at  the  point  of  greatest  convenience  to  the  merchan- 
dise department  to  be  served.  But  the  results  and 
records  are  kept  at  the  one  central  headquarters. 

And  the  skilled  and  expert  merchandise  checkers 
from  the  selfsame  headquarters  are  the  men  and  women 


1 66  The  Romance  of  a  Great  Store 

who  oversee  the  unpacking — invariably.  They  pass 
the  responsibility  of  their  stamp  and  signature  upon 
their  receipts  before  the  merchandise  is  turned  over  to 
the  department  manager,  who  himself,  or  through  his 
responsibility,  purchased  it.  Nothing  is  left  to  guess- 
work, or  to  chance. 

Now  we  see  the  full  responsibility  settled  once  again 
upon  the  broad  shoulders — let  us  hope  indeed  that  they 
are  broad — of  the  buyer.  With  a  full  knowledge  of 
the  price  that  he  paid  for  them,  of  market  conditions, 
and  of  the  prices  of  Macy's  competitors  he  determines 
the  prices  at  which  his  merchandise  is  to  be  sold. 
Clerks,  known  as  markers,  quickly  attach  these  prices 
by  small  tags  to  the  goods  themselves. 

From  the  marking-rooms,  where  everything  to  be 
sold  within  this  market-place  is  plainly  and  unequivo- 
cally priced,  the  merchandise  goes  without  further  delay 
either  direct  to  the  counters  of  the  selling  floors,  or  into 
the  "reserves" — the  warehouses  that  extend  all  the  way 
from  Twenty-eighth  Street  to  north  of  Thirty-fifth, 
and  from  Broadway  to  Eighth  Avenue.  The  stage  is 
set.  The  show  is  ready.  The  performance  may  now 
begin. 

A  trip  through  the  hinterland  of  the  Macy  store  is 
like  a  visit  behind  the  scenes  of  a  modern  theater.  You 
see  there  just  the  way  in  which  the  drama  of  selling 
actually  is  staged,  from  the  settings  to  the  properties. 
You  rub  shoulders  with  the  actors  and  actresses,  just 
off  stage  j  with  the  electrician,  the  stage-manager,  the 
carpenter  and  the  stage-hands.  And  always  your  ear 


Displaying  and  Selling  the  Goods  167 

is  waiting  to  hear  outside  the  orchestra  and  the  applause 
of  the  audience. 

Into  that  ear  there  comes  the  almost  rhythmic  thud 
of  automatic  machines  j  a  sort  of  continuous  drone. 
You  turn  quickly  and  find  beside  you  a  row  of  ticket- 
printers,  the  little  electric  presses  in  which  are  made 
the  price-tags  that  you  find  pinned  or  pasted  or  tied  on 
every  piece  of  Macy  merchandise  you  buy.  Miles  of 
thin  cardboard  are  fed  into  one  side  of  these  machines 
and  come  out  the  other  j  in  proper-sized  units,  with 
the  selling  price  of  the  article  to  be  tagged  plainly 
printed  on  them.  Where  the  article  is  subject  to  Fed- 
eral tax,  this  is  also  included  as  a  separate  item  and  the 
total  given.  One  of  these  machines  combines  the  opera- 
tion of  printing  the  price  and  attaching  the  ticket  to  the 
garment.  It  is  detail — necessary  detail,  detail  upon  a 
vast  scale. 

Here,  then,  is  the  receiving  department  of  this  great 
single  retailing  machine  of  modern  business.  It  keeps 
over  three  hundred  human  units  constantly  upon  the 
move — and,  mind  you,  all  that  these  people  are  doing 
is  merely  making  the  merchandise  ready  to  sell.  The 
next  step  is  the  final  one  before  actual  sale;  the  display 
of  proffered  goods — upon  the  counters  and  within  the 
plate-glass  windows  along  the  street  frontages. 

This,  in  the  modern  department-store,  is  considered 
a  feature  of  the  utmost  importance,  and  nowhere  more 
so  than  at  Macy's.  Sixty-four  years  of  salesmanship 
experience,  in  the  course  of  which  it  has  been  the  orig- 


1 68  The  Romance  of  a  Great  Store 

inator  of  many  daring  and  successful  display  experi- 
ments, has  shown  the  house  their  full  value. 

Yet,  even  in  Macy's,  there  are  certain  reservations 
to  the  strong  house  policy  of  attractive  display.  Cer- 
tain fundamentals  are  stressed.  The  invitation  to  buy 
is  forever  put  in  the  goods  themselves  rather  than  in 
the  background  against  which  they  are  shown.  It 
requires  no  especial  astuteness  to  see  from  this  fact 
alone  an  enormous  expense  is  saved  j  the  benefit  of 
which,  according  to  the  now  well  understood  Macy 
plan,  is  passed  on  to  buyer.  Other  stores  spend  many 
thousands  of  dollars  in  building  and  decorating  special 
rooms  and  sections  for  merchandising  which  are  far 
out  of  the  ordinary.  To  give  an  air  of  extreme  exclu- 
siveness,  chic,  Parisian  atmosphere — call  it  what  you 
may — elaborate  partitions  are  put  up  and  expensive 
decorators  given  carte-blanche.  The  result  is  beautiful, 
almost  invariably.  Shopping  in  such  surroundings 
becomes  a  peculiar  delight — particularly  to  the  woman 
patron.  But  milady  pays.  In  the  expressive,  if  not 
elegant,  old  phrase  she  "pays  through  the  nose." 

That  some  New  York  shoppers  may  like  to  pay  this 
way  is  not  for  a  moment  to  be  doubted,  but  that  the 
majority  do,  Macy's  stoutly  refuses  to  believe.  While 
the  house  has  not  hesitated  to  install  certain  very  lovely 
"special"  rooms — vide  the  salon  for  the  display  of  its 
imported  frocks — the  main  thought  in  the  construc- 
tion of  its  present  home  in  Herald  Square  was  to  build 
a  retail  market-place  which  would  afford  honest,  effi- 
cient, comfortable  marketing  at  the  lowest  possible 
prices.  This  meant  that  it  would  be  inadvisable,  to  say 


Displaying  and  Selling  the  Goods  169 

the  least,  to  give  the  store  the  atmosphere  of  either  a 
palace  or  a  boudoir.  This  is  a  policy  that  has  continued 
until  this  day. 

None  the  less,  Macy  goods  are  displayed  with  the 
taste  that  makes  them  most  desirable  to  the  customer  j 
psychological  forethought,  in  a  word.  Novelties,  of 
course,  take  precedence  over  staples — the  articles  that 
make  the  customer  stop  and  investigate.  Except  under 
unusual  conditions,  the  demand  for  staples  does  not 
have  to  be  stimulated,  and  ordinarily  no  especial 
attempt  is  made  to  give  them  more  than  ordinary  dis- 
play. One  underlying  factor  in  the  successful  display 
of  goods  is  to  preserve  harmonious  color  relations 
between  them  and,  so  far  as  possible,  this  harmony 
pervades  the  entire  floor.  The  buying  public  would  not 
tolerate  a  store  where  they  heard  profanity  among  the 
employees ;  and  at  Macy's  they  do  not  have  to  endure 
colors  that  swear  at  one  another. 

Held  in  high  esteem  by  the  public  as  well  as  by  the 
store  itself  are  the  display  windows  which  line  the  entire 
ground-floor  frontage  of  the  building  on  Broadway 
and  on  Thirty-fourth  and  Thirty-fifth  Streets.  Here 
merchandise  is  arranged  by  master  window  dressers 
under  the  general  direction  of  the  advertising  depart- 
ment, for  if  the  front  windows  of  a  house  such  as  this 
are  not  advertising,  what,  then,  is?  Especially  when 
the  art  of  window  dressing  has  come  in  recent  years  to 
be  a  finely  developed  art  of  its  own.  For  many  years 
before  it  left  Fourteenth  Street  Macy's  had  a  fame  not 
merely  nation-wide  but  fairly  world-wide  for  its 
window  displays — we  already  have  referred  to  the  won- 


1 70  The  Romance  of  a  Great  Store 

drous  Christmas  pageants  that  it  formerly  held  as  a 
part  of  them.  In  this  it  was  again  a  pioneer,  blazing 
a  new  commercial  path  for  its  competitors  to  follow. 

Because  window  display  is  recognized  as  advertising, 
the  ceaseless  work  of  the  master  window  dressers  upon 
the  outer  rim  of  the  Macy  store  comes  under  the  direct 
supervision  of  the  advertising  department  which  in  turn 
reports  direct  to  no  less  an  authority  than  the  triple 
partnership  itself.  Publicity  is  the  great  right-arm 
of  the  super-store  of  the  America  of  today.  Publicity 
not  in  one  channel,  but  in  a  thousand.  Macy's  not  only 
helps  to  dominate  the  advertising  pages  of  the  news- 
papers of  New  York  and  a  good  many  miles  round 
about  it,  its  red  star  not  only  gleams  in  Herald  Square, 
but  in  these  very  recent  days  upon  the  high-set  electric 
hoardings  of  Times  Square  that  blaze  forth  far  into  the 
night  j  it  finds  its  way  into  the  public  thought  here  and 
there  and  everywhere.  And  yet,  with  due  appreciation 
of  every  other  medium  of  publicity,  the  street  window 
of  the  store  still  remains  one  of  the  most  important 
phases  of  its  appeal  to  possible  patrons. 

Its  displays  are  scheduled  long  in  advance;  are 
devised  as  carefully  as  the  decoration  of  a  home  might 
be,  or,  better  still,  as  Urban  or  Pogany  would  plan  the 
stage-settings  of  a  scene  in  the  Metropolitan  or  at  any 
one  of  the  various  "Follies"  that  one  finds  just  north 
of  the  Opera  House.  A  large  staff  of  men  is  kept  con- 
stantly at  work  dressing  the  windows,  and  this  staff 
includes  the  carpenters,  paper-hangers,  painters  and 
electricians  who  are  needed  to  help  prepare  the  special 
exhibits.  Under  the  floor  of  the  window  next  the  prin- 


Displaying  and  Selling  the  Goods  171 

cipal  entrance  on  Thirty-fourth  Street  there  is  a  tank, 
which  is  used  when  a  pool  of  water  is  required  to  carry 
out  some  scenic  effect.  It  is  capable  of  floating  a  canoe 
to  suggest  the  joys  of  camping  and  the  need  of  going 
to  Macy's  for  one's  vacation  requisites — as  well  as  for 
use  in  other  capacities.  Known  in  the  store  as  the 
"parlor  window"  it  has  been  made  to  represent  pretty 
nearly  everything  from  milady's  bedroom  to  a  glorified 
carpenter  shop. 

Window  displays  are  regarded  by  Macy's  as  an 
important  auxiliary  to  newspaper  announcements. 
Very  recently,  during  the  few  weeks  before  Christmas, 
a  sale  of  overcoats  was  advertised.  All  the  windows 
were  then  dressed  with  Christmas  merchandise,  but 
from  one  of  them  this  was  all  removed  and  the  sale 
overcoats  substituted.  For  one  day  only.  For  upon 
the  very  next  one  the  Christmas  window  was  returned 
to  its  holly  and  mistletoe  flavor. 

Here  is  a  pretty  direct  indication  of  the  store's  atti- 
tude towards  its  immensely  valuable  windows — if  you 
do  not  consider  them  valuable  inquire  the  price  of  the 
advertising  signs  in  the  Herald  Square  neighborhood. 
I  asked  its  advertising  manager  if,  in  his  opinion,  the 
window  space  would  not  bring  better  returns  if  it  were 
devoted  to  direct  selling,  instead  of  mere  indirect  selling 
through  display.  I  had  in  the  back  of  my  mind  some 
of  the  great  Paris  emporiums  who  think  so  little  of 
window-  and  so  much  of  selling-space  that  on  bright 
warm  days  they  spread  some  of  their  notions  and 
novelty-counters  right  out  upon  the  broad  sidewalks 
of  the  Boulevards. 


1 72  The  Romance  of  a  Great,  Store 

"No,"  said  he,  "decidedly  no.  To  be  able  to  show 
one's  goods  to  the  multitudes  that  pass  these  windows 
nearly  every  hour  of  the  day  is  an  asset  that  cannot  be 
overestimated." 

This  is  neither  the  time  nor  the  place  to  go  into  the 
ethics  or  the  fine  principles  of  the  most  recently  devel- 
oped of  American  professions — advertising j  the  sales- 
manship of  goods  and  of  ideas  not  so  much  by  the 
merchandise  itself  as  by  the  representation  of  it. 
Neither  is  it  the  place  to  review  the  vast  position  that 
the  modern  department  store  has  taken  in  the  develop- 
ment of  modern  advertising  of  every  sort :  Newspapers, 
magazines,  bill-boards,  electric  signs,  other  forms  of 
display  as  well.  There  are  folk  who  say  that  if  it  were 
not  for  the  department-store  advertising  we  should 
not  have  had  the  fully  developed  metropolitan  news- 
paper of  today  j  while,  on  the  other  hand,  some  of  the 
larger  merchants  are  not  reluctant  in  saying  that  our 
modern  metropolitan  newspapers  are  the  chief  causes 
that  have  made  the  department-store  as  we  know  it  in 
New  York  and  other  large  cities  of  the  United  States 
possible.  Be  these  things  as  they  may,  the  fact  does 
remain,  however,  solid  and  indisputable,  that  the 
co-operation  between  these  two  groups  of  interests  has 
been  more  than  profitable  to  their  patrons,  to  say 
nothing  of  themselves.  And  not  the  least  of  the  con- 
tributing causes  to  such  profits  is  the  fundamental 
honesty  of  the  advertisements. 

Not  so  very  many  years  ago  the  measure  of  integrity 
in  advertising  was,  to  speak  charitably,  a  variable  one. 


Displaying  and  Selling  the  Goods  173 

When  they  talked  about  them  in  print  merchants  were 
very  likely  to  become  overenthusiastic  about  their 
goods.  Modesty  was  flung  to  the  four  winds. 
Printers'  ink  seemed  to  be  taken  as  an  automatic  abso- 
lution for  exaggeration — and  oftimes  absolute  mis- 
statement — and,  strangely  enough,  the  public  appeared 
to  fall  in  with  the  idea.  More  often  than  not  the 
merchant  "got  away  with  it" — or,  if  not,  made  good 
with  bad  grace,  in  which  case  the  customer  was  satisfied. 
He  had  to  be. 

But  not  so  with  Macy's.  Early  in  its  history  an 
advertising  policy  was  formulated  that  has  endured  to 
the  present  and  will  continue  to  endure.  It  is  the 
house's  stoutly  expressed  belief  that  there  is  no  possible 
excuse  whatsoever  for  misrepresentation  and,  following 
this  out,  it  is  its  invariable  rule  to  stand  back  of  its 
advertising,  to  the  last  ditch.  To  this  end  it  has 
inculcated  such  a  spirit  of  conservatism  into  its  adver- 
tising department  that  the  superlative  is  eliminated  and 
forbidden  in  describing  Macy  goods.  "We  may  think 
that  these  articles  are  the  best,  or  the  most  beautiful, 
or  the  greatest  bargain,  but  we  can't  absolutely  be  sure 
of  it."  That  is  its  attitude.  The  only  possible 
criticism  is  the  same  that  one  applies  to  the  man  who 
stands  so  straight  that  he  leans  backward. 

Is  the  system  flawless?  Of  course  not — no  system 
is.  Not  many  weeks  ago  an  incident  occurred  that 
shows  how  Macy's  may  slip  up — and  then  make  good; 
it  put  out  a  small  newspaper  advertisement  featuring 
coats  for  small  boys  at  $8.74.  These  were  advertised 
as  "wool  chinchilla"  and  so  potent  was  the  appeal  of 


174  The  Romance  of  a  Great  Store 

the  notice  that  by  ten  o'clock  the  entire  stock  of  nine 
hundred  coats  was  gone.  Then  one  of  the  store 
executives  discovered  that  the  coats  were  not  all  wool 
and  things  began  to  hum. 

"Never  said  that  they  were  all  wool,"  the  respon- 
sible sub-executive  cornered.  "People  ought  to  know 
that  they  can't  buy  an  all-wool  coat  for  that  money." 

That  made  no  difference  with  the  big  boss. 
Patiently  and  firmly  he  explained  that  in  a  Macy 
advertisement  "wool"  means  "all-wool"  except  where 
it  is  clearly  specified  that  it  contains  cotton.  Another 
advertisement  was  inserted  in  the  newspapers  the  fol- 
lowing day.  It  explained  and  apologized  for  the  mis- 
statement  and  said,  "We  would  deem  it  a  favor  if  our 
customers  would  bring  in  these  coats  and  accept  a  return 
of  their  money."  Out  of  the  nine  hundred  coats  sold 
one  was  brought  back  for  credit,  while  another  was 
brought  in  by  a  customer  who  wanted  to  keep  the  coat 
but  thought  that  she  might  get  a  rebate.  She  didn't. 
Macy's  may  lean  over  backward  but  it  doesn't  drag  on 
the  ground — an  instance  of  which  is  contained  in  the 
following: 

Christmas  candy  for  Sunday  Schools  was  advertised 
in  a  number  of  New  York  newspapers  at  the  very  low 
price  of  $7.44  for  one  hundred  pounds.  In  one  news- 
paper three  pieces  of  type  fell  out  of  the  form  with  the 
result  that  the  advertisement  went  to  press  quoting  a 
hundred-weight  of  candy  at  forty-four  cents!  It  was 
patent  that  it  was  a  typographical  error,  for  the 
decimal  point,  as  well  as  the  dollar  mark  and  the  figure 
7  was  gone  and  there  was  a  blank  space  where  the 


Displaying  and  Selling  the  Goods  175 

types  were  missing.  Three  would-be  customers  tried, 
however,  to  hold  the  store  accountable  for  the  very 
obvious  error.  And  Macy's  balked! 

The  lowest-in-the-city-prices  policy  keeps  the  adver- 
tising department  on  its  toes  continually.  Other  stores' 
prices  must  be  anticipated  wherever  it  is  humanly  pos- 
sible, which  means  constant  revisions  of  the  copy. 
Occasionally  a  price  duel  develops  that  becomes  spec- 
tacular in  the  extreme.  In  a  recent  memorable  one 
"hard  water  soap"  figured  as  the  casus  belli.  Macy 
patrons  know  their  right  now  to  expect  lowest  prices, 
so  when  another  store  began  to  cut  Macy's  advertised 
prices  on  this  commodity,  Macy's  had  to  return  in  suite. 
Whereupon  the  other  store  cut  under  Macy's  again ; 
and  Macy's  in  turn  went  its  competitor  one  better.  It 
then  became  a  merry  game  of  parry  and  thrust  until, 
one  fine  day,  Macy's  was  selling  twelve  dozen  cakes 
of  hard  water  soap  for  the  inconsiderable  sum  of  one 
copper  cent.  One  came  near  godliness  for  a  small 
amount  that  day.  The  public  profited  hugely,  but 
Macy's  lived  up  to  its  policy. 

As  a  rule  advertisements  originate  with  the  depart- 
ment managers.  Keeping  in  mind  that  they  are  the 
buyers,  the  merchants  responsible  for  the  moving  of 
their  stock,  it  can  be  seen  that  they  know  best  the  goods 
that  ought  to  be  featured.  The  value  of  the  space 
used  is  charged  against  their  departments,  so  that  their 
requisitions  are  governed  accordingly.  The  adver- 
tising manager  is  a  large  factor,  however,  in  the  allot- 
ment of  space — not  only  the  clearing-house,  but 


176  The  Romance  of  a  Great  Store 

practically  the  court  of  last  resort — concerning  the  rival 
claims  by  the  department  manager  for  space  upon  a 
given  day.  After  all,  there  is  a  limit  to  the  size  of  a 
newspaper  page. 

When  a  certain  line  of  goods  is  about  to  be  adver- 
tised, the  comparison  department  is  notified  and  the 
articles  are  "shopped."  That  is,  one  or  more  of  the 
expert  shopping  staff  is  given  the  task  of  ascertaining 
what  other  stores  are  charging  for  the  same  things  so 
that  it  may  be  made  sure  that  the  Macy  price  will  be 
lower.  The  information  then  is  passed  on  to  the  copy 
writing  staff  and  samples  of  the  goods  are  studied  for 
selling  points.  While  the  description  is  being  written, 
one  of  the  art  staff  makes  a  drawing,  either  in  the  nature 
of  a  design  or  illustration,  and  when  these  are  com- 
pleted the  advertisement  is  set  in  type.  This,  bear  in 
mind,  is  only  for  one  item.  Macy  advertisements, 
more  often  than  not,  cover  an  entire  newspaper  page 
and  are  made  up  of  many  separate  items,  each  of  which 
goes  through  practically  the  same  process  of  creation. 
Their  final  collection  and  arrangement  on  the  page  are 
made  by  an  advertising  expert  of  skill  and  taste  and 
from  this  fact,  combined  with  the  distinctive  type  faces 
that  are  commonly  used,  one  might  be  reasonably  sure 
of  identifying  a  Macy  advertisement  even  if  the  store 
name  were  to  be  entirely  omitted. 

In  addition  to  window  display,  newspaper  and  maga- 
zine announcements,  it  is  the  concern  of  the  advertising 
department  to  provide  the  store  with  its  sign  cards  and 
special-price  tickets.  These  are  all  a  part  of  the  big 
problem  of  letting  the  public  know  about  Macy  goods. 


Displaying  and  Selling  the  Goods  177 

Yet  above  and  beyond  all  of  these  things,  the  store's 
supreme  advertisement,  if  you  please,  is  the  establish- 
ment itself,  the  service  that  it  strives  so  sincerely  to 
give.  To  use  the  current  phrase  of  expert  publicity 
men,  the  store,  its  salespeople  and  its  prices  must  sell 
Macy's  to  the  outside  world.  Outside  advertising  is 
but  supplementary  to  thisj  but  a  single  horse  in  a  team 
of  four. 

With  this  fact  firmly  fixed  in  your  mind,  consider 
next  the  unbending  problem  of  making  the  salesf  orce 
into  a  genuine  salesf  orce  j  one  that  constantly  and 
continually  backs  up  the  force  of  the  printed  advertise- 
ment by  the  skill  of  its  real  salesmanship.  When  we 
come  in  another  chapter  to  consider  the  Macy  family 
as  a  whole  we  shall  see  in  some  detail  its  remarkable 
educational  and  training  opportunities.  These  have 
been  brought  to  bear  directly  upon  the  creation,  not 
only  of  thoroughness  and  accuracy  on  the  part  of  the 
clerk,  but  for  courtesy  and  persuasiveness  and  enthusi- 
asm as  well — the  things  that  make  the  structure  of 
morale  j  that  quality  that  we  first  began  to  know  and 
to  understand  as  such  in  the  days  of  the  Great  War. 

"If  you  are  playing  a  game,  such  as  tennis,  or  bridge, 
or  baseball  or  what-not,"  said  one  of  the  department 
managers  to  his  sales  staff  but  a  few  mornings  ago, 
"you  are  out  to  beat  your  best  friend  j  if  you  can,  do  it 
fairly  and  squarely,  otherwise  never.  The  enjoyment 
you  derive  from  a  game  depends  on  the  spirit  with 
which  you  play  it.  When  you  begin  to  regard  business 
in  a  similar  light,  playing  it  as  a  game  in  a  sportsman- 


1 78  The  Romance  of  a  Great  Store 

like  manner,  then  you  will  begin  to  get  fun  out  of  it — 
you  will  begin  to  make  progress." 

After  the  preliminary  training  which  every  salesclerk 
receives,  he  or  she  is  assigned  to  a  department. 
Thenceforward  a  good  deal  depends  on  personal 
initiative}  for  in  dealing  with  customers  no  small  part 
of  the  store's  reputation  for  efficiency  and  courtesy 
depends  upon  the  individual  clerk.  A  salesperson  may 
become  not  only  a  distinct  asset  to  the  house,  but  may 
develop  a  personal  clientele  through  especially  intelli- 
gent and  courteous  attention  to  the  customers'  wishes. 
And  this,  owing  to  the  system  of  allowing  a  bonus  on 
sales  above  a  certain  fixed  quota,  and  a  commission  on 
sales  up  to  that  quota,  may  make  it  financially  very 
much  worth  while  to  him  or  her. 

Salesmanship  in  a  store  as  large  as  Macy's  must  of 
necessity  include  the  knowledge  of  considerable  detail 
in  the  making  out  of  sales  slips,  procedure  with  regard 
to  C.  O.  D.  deliveries,  depositors'  accounts,  exchanges 
and  the  like.  This  knowledge  is  a  fundamental  part 
of  each  salesperson's  equipment.  His  or  her  efficiency 
must  come,  however,  from  a  far  wider  development  of 
the  possibilities  of  the  salesmanship,  from  the  "playing 
of  the  game,"  as  the  department  manager  put  it  but  a 
moment  ago — the  understanding  use  of  courtesy,  mer- 
chandise knowledge,  helpfulness.  Such  efficiency 
pays.  The  Macy  folk  who  come  to  use  it  regularly 
soon  find  themselves  advancing  to  responsible  and 
highly-paid  positions. 

It  is  interesting  to  follow  the  career  of  a  sales  slip 


Displaying  and  Selling  the  Goods  1 79 

from  the  time  it  is  made  out — when  the  sale  is  made — 
until  the  time  that  it  ceases  to  function.  Here  is  one 
of  the  most  important  items  in  the  mechanism  of  a 
large  retail  store.  It  is  an  essential  unit  of  a  carefully 
developed  system  to  keep  track  of  sales,  from  the 
minute  that  they  are  made  until  they  are  finally 
delivered  and  audited. 

The  sales  slip — the  Macy  clerk  has  three  different 
ones  of  them  in  all — is  made  in  three  distinct  parts — 
original,  duplicate  and  triplicate.  Each  of  these  is 
divided  into  several  parts  j  each  of  which  in  turn  is 
destined  for  separate  hands.  The  packer  of  the  mer- 
chandise gets  one  part,  which  eventually  goes  to  the 
customer,  a  second  to  the  cashier,  the  third  the  clerk 
retains.  Eventually  these  last  two  come  together  once 
again  in  the  auditing  department  and  are  checked,  the 
one  against  the  other  $  after  which  one  goes  into  the 
archives  of  the  bureau  of  investigation,  in  case  that 
there  is  any  further  question  about  the  details  of  the 
transaction.  This  one  example  of  the  infinite  detail  in 
the  conduct  of  a  great  store  is  a  slight  indication  of  the 
responsibility  upon  the  shoulders  of  not  only  its 
managers  but  the  rank  and  file  of  its  salesf  orce  as  well. 
A  single  error  in  the  making  out  of  a  sales  slip  may 
easily  result  in  expensive  and  harassing  complications 
all  the  way  along  the  line. 

A  system  of  transfer  books  enables  the  store's  cus- 
tomer to  make  purchases  in  its  various  departments 
with  the  least  possible  waiting.  The  goods  and  prices 
are  entered  in  a  small  book  which  is  given  the  customer 
at  the  time  of  the  first  purchase  of  the  day.  While 


i8o  The  Romance  of  a  Great  Store 

the  customer  is  making  his  or  her  other  purchases  they 
are  being  sent  to  the  wrapping  room  where  they  are 
held  in  a  growing  group  until  the  customer  presents 
the  book  to  the  cashier  at  the  transfer  desk  on  the  main 
floor,  pays  the  total  and,  a  few  minutes  later,  receives 
a  neat  package  in  which  all  of  the  items  are  wrapped 
together  j  or  else  it  is  sent  to  any  designated  address. 

Enough,  for  the  moment,  of  detail.  Some  of  it  is 
necessary  to  a  proper  understanding  of  the  workings 
of  this  great  machine  of  modern  business,  but  too  much 
of  it  may  easily  bore  you.  Instead,  quickly  turn  your 
attention  to  a  Macy  feature  dear  to  the  heart  of  the 
average  shopper — male  or  deadlier.  Here  is  the 
familiar,  the  time-honored  "special  sale."  In  holding 
these  Macy  does  not  lay  claim  to  originality,  except 
perhaps  in  the  amount  of  merchandising  involved  and 
the  spectacularly  low  prices.  Sales  are  in  a  large 
measure  opportunities  for  the  store  as  well  as  for  the 
customer.  It  takes  a  goodly  amount  of  merchandise 
from  a  manufacturer  who  for  some  reason  offers  a 
large  concession  in  price  and  passes  on  its  advantage  to 
its  customers.  This  is  not  generosity.  It  is  good 
business.  It  is  sound  business.  It  is  progressive 
business. 

Take  a  sale  of  laundry  soap  that  went  on  within  the 
great  store  about  a  year  ago.  The  soap  was  made  in  this 
country  and  contracted  for  by  the  city  of  Paris,  upon  a 
dollar  basis.  Exchange  slumped,  and  with  francs 
worth  only  a  fraction  of  their  former  value,  Paris 
couldn't  afford  to  take  it.  Macy's  offer  for  it 


Displaying  and  Selling  the  Goods  1 8 1 

was  accepted  and  so  marked  was  the  reduction  at  which 
it  was  offered  to  the  public  that  inside  of  two  weeks 
the  big  store  had  sold  twenty-two  carloads  of  it. 
Figuring  from  the  fact  that  a  carload  comprised  six 
hundred  cases,  the  turnover  amounted  to  6,862  cases  j 
or,  counting  a  hundred  bars  to  a  case,  686,200  pieces  of 
soap! 

The  most  successful  sale  of  winter  underwear  that 
Macy's  ever  held  took  place  during  a  very  warm 
week  in  July,  a  twelvemonth  before  the  laundry  soap 
episode.  A  large  manufacturer  wanted  to  unload  his 
stock  and  Macy's  bought  it  for  cash.  Add  to  these 
facts  the  consideration  that  the  goods  were  away  out 
of  season  and  you  can  readily  see  how  it  was  possible 
to  buy  the  goods  at  a  very  low  price.  Relying  upon 
the  public's  ability  to  judge  values,  in  and  out  of 
season,  the  store  launched  the  sale — and  launched  it 
successfully.  It  was  like  a  scene  out  of  Alice  in 
Wonderland  to  see  the  crowds  of  men  and  women  with 
perspiration  rolling  down  their  foreheads  buying 
woolen  "undies"  against  the  needs  of  winter.  Ameri- 
cans do  like  to  be  forehanded. 

Macy's  ability  to  buy  and  sell  huge  quantities  of 
merchandise  is  demonstrated  through  these  sales. 
Very  recently  over  seven  thousand  of  a  particular 
leather  traveling  bag  were  sold  in  less  than  four  weeks, 
at  an  aggregate  price  of  nearly  $75,000.  In  one  day 
seven  hundred  vacuum  cleaners  were  sold  for  $29.75 
each.  This  list  might  be  continued  indefinitely  5  for 
not  only  has  Macy's  proved  that  it  pays  to  advertise 
but  that  it  pays  to  follow  the  Macy  advertisements. 


1 82  The  Romance  of  a  Great  Store 

Down  in  the  basement  of  this  great  mart  of  Herald 
Square  there  is  a  corner  not  often  shown  to  the  outer 
world,  from  which  there  constantly  emerge  noises  which 
blend  and  combine  to  give  the  effect  of  a  staccato 
rumble.  Thud,  thud,  t-h-u-u-d,  thud,  thudity,  thud, 
thud.  Then  a  sound  of  air,  as  in  a  Gargantuan  sigh. 
Thudity,  thud,  and  so  on,  ad  infinitum.  These  sounds 
seemingly  are  quite  unending.  If  your  curiosity  draws 
you  toward  the  door  from  which  these  sounds  emerge 
and  you  finally  are  premitted  to  open  it  and  go  within, 
you  will  find  a  company  of  young  women  sitting  along 
both  sides  of  three  sets  of  moving  belts,  quickly  pick- 
ing brass  cylinders  from  the  belts  as  they  pass  them. 
Except  for  the  fact  that  there  is  another  tube  room  on 
the  fourth  floor  (for  the  upper  floor  selling  depart- 
ments) this  basement  place  might  truly  be  called  the 
heart  of  the  store,  for  it  is  these  brass  cylinders  that 
contain  the  life-blood  of  the  business,  the  cash  which 
the  customers  pay  for  their  purchases.  Call  the  tube 
room  the  pulse  of  the  store  and  the  analogy  is  better — 
certainly  their  throbbing  is  a  close  index  of  its 
condition. 

Alert  cashiers  pick  up  the  carriers  from  the  upper 
belt  as  they  pass,  deftly  make  the  required  change,  and 
drop  them  to  the  lower  belt,  on  which  they  are  con- 
veyed to  other  young  women  who  despatch  them  to 
the  departments  whence  they  came.  This  continues 
for  approximately  eight  hours  each  working  day.  The 
cash  carriers  do  considerable  traveling  in  the  course  of 
a  year.  One  of  them  might  easily  go  from  the  new 
Bagdad  to  the  old.  Yes,  it  might.  If  you  still  scoff 


Displaying  and  Selling  the  Goods  183 

let  us  look  at  the  system  together  and  do  a  little  figur- 
ing upon  our  own  account. 

Throughout  the  store  there  are  two  hundred  and 
fifty  cash  stations — the  outer  terminals  of  the  line  at 
one  of  whose  common  hearts  we  now  stand.  Each  of 
these  stations  is  connected  with  one  or  the  other  of  the 
common  hearts  by  two  separate  lines  of  tubing,  one  for 
sending  and  the  other  for  receiving  the  carriers. 
There  is  a  total  of  125,000  feet  of  this  tubing,  or  nearly 
twenty-four  miles.  Five  thousand  cash  carriers  are 
in  use  and  the  average  number  of  round-trips  made 
per  day  by  all  of  them  is  150,000.  Each  round-trip 
averages  two  hundred  and  fifty  feet.  The  average 
distance  traveled  each  day  by  this  host  of  travelers  then 
comes  to  the  astonishing  total  of  37,500,000  feet — 
7,155  miles.  Now  to  your  atlases  and  find  how  far 
the  new  Bagdad  is  from  the  old.  And  if  that  distance 
does  not  give  you  pause,  consider  that  the  peak-load  of 
the  system  was  carried  on  a  day  when  its  mileage  ran 
to  12,120 — an  equivalent  of  one-half  the  distance 
around  the  world — in  a  little  over  eight  hours. 

Truly  it  would  seem  that  money  goes  far  at  Macy's. 


V.     Distributing  the  Goods 

WHEN  milady  of  Manhattan  finishes  her  pur- 
chases in  Macy's,  snaps  her  purse  together  once 
again  and  goes  out  of  the  store,  the  transaction  is  ended, 
at  least  as  far  as  she  herself  is  concerned.  But  not  so 
for  Macy's.  Particularly  not  so  when  she  has  given 
orders  that  the  goods  be  "sent,"  either  to  her  own  home 
or  to  the  home  of  some  friend.  In  such  cases  the 
largest  part  of  the  store's  responsibility  still  is  ahead 
of  it.  It  must  see  to  it  that  the  package — or  packages — 
shall  be  carried  to  the  proper  destination,  quickly, 
promptly,  correctly.  Which  means  that  the  great 
business  machine  of  Herald  Square  has  another  great 
function  to  perform. 

There  is,  in  the  sub-basement  of  the  Herald  Square 
store,  where  the  greatest  portion  of  its  own  great  trans- 
portation system  is  situated,  an  ancient  two-wheeled 
cart,  somewhat  faded  and  battered,  yet  still  a  red 
delivery  wagon  and  showing  clearly  the  name  of  the 
house  it  served,  R.  H.  Macy  &  Company.  It  is  a 
treasured  relic  of  other  days,  which  now  and  then  again, 
at  great  intervals,  is  shown  to  the  populace  in  the  all- 
too-rare  parades  of  the  huge  wagon  equipment  of  the 
store  today. 

The  gentleman  who  gives  the  lecture  which  accom- 

185 


1 86  The  Romance  of  a  Great  Store 

panics  any  public  showing  of  this  ancient  equipage  is 
Mr.  James  Woods,  who,  as  we  have  already  seen,  has 
been  with  the  store  for  nearly  half  a  century  and  who 
has  risen  in  its  service  to  the  important  post  of  assistant 
superintendent  of  the  delivery  department.  Mr. 
Woods  regards  the  cart  with  tender  affection,  since  it 
was  he  who  once  was  the  human  horse  who  strode  be- 
tween its  shafts.  That  was  back  in  1873,  long  years 
before  the  store  had  moved  north  from  the  once  tree- 
shaded  Fourteenth  Street.  Mr.  Macy,  himself,  was 
still  very  much  in  charge  of  the  enterprise  and  was 
passing  proud  of  his  delivery  "fleet" — consisting  of 
three  horse-drawn  wagons,  and  young  Jimmie  Woods 
with  the  cart.  A  good  many  prosperous  New  Yorkers 
then  had  their  residences  within  a  dozen  blocks  or 
less  of  the  old  store,  and  young  Jimmie's  legs — 
and  the  cart — could  and  did  serve  them,  easily  and 
expeditiously. 

That  was  almost  the  beginning  of  the  Macy  delivery 
department.  In  fact  it  had  been  but  five  years  before 
that  Mr.  Macy  had  acquired  the  first  horse-drawn  rig 
for  this  purpose.  From  that  beginning  the  growth 
was  steady  although  slow.  Ten  years  after  Mr.  Woods 
first  came  to  it — in  1883 — there  were  but  fifteen 
wagons.  In  1902,  when  the  great  trek  was  made  north 
to  Herald  Square,  there  were  a  hundred.  Today  there 
are  more  than  two  hundred  and  fifty,  of  which  by  far 
the  larger  number  are  motor  driven.  These  last  range 
all  the  way  from  the  big  five-ton  motor  trucks  which, 
as  we  shall  presently  see,  are  used  primarily  for  carry- 
ing merchandise  between  the  store  and  its  outlying 


Distributing  the  Goods  187 

distributing  stations,  down  to  the  small  one-ton  truck, 
which  is  used  at  its  greatest  advantage  in  city  street 
distribution.  And  an  astonishing  number  of  horse- 
drawn  vehicles  remain.  That  is,  astonishing  to  the 
uninitiated  layman,  who  perhaps  has  been  led  to  believe 
that  the  motor  truck  in  this,  its  heyday  of  perfection, 
could  hardly  be  surpassed  for  any  form  of  carrying. 
As  a  matter  of  fact,  however,  the  department-stores  as 
well  as  the  express  companies,  skilled  in  the  multiple 
distribution  of  small  packages,  have,  after  a  careful  and 
intensive  study  of  the  motor  trucks — which  has  resulted 
in  their  ordering  many,  many  hundreds  of  them  for 
certain  of  their  necessities — discovered  that  for  certain 
forms  of  delivery  the  horse  and  wagon  still  remains 
unsurpassed.  The  time  that  a  delivery  wagon  remains 
standing  becomes  an  economic  factor  in  its  use.  If  it 
moved  all  the  time  it  undoubtedly  would  be  as  cheap 
and  certainly  more  efficient  to  use  a  small  automobile 
truck.  But  when  there  are  fairly  lengthy  stops  and 
close  together,  where  perhaps  the  vehicle  is  idle  for 
four  minutes  for  every  one  that  it  is  actually  in  opera- 
tion, the  factor  of  having  an  expensive  machine  idle  as 
against  an  inexpensive  one  comes  into  play. 

Business  organizations  reckon  these  things  not  alone 
from  sentiment,  but. from  hard-headed  facts.  Yet  they 
are  not  entirely  free  from  sentiment,  even  in  such 
seemingly  purely  commercial  matters  as  delivery.  The 
very  condition  and  upkeep  of  the  vehicles  of  a  high- 
grade  department-store  show  this.  "Spic-and-span" 
is  hardly  the  phrase  by  which  to  describe  them.  Fresh 
paint  and  gold  striping — the  smooth  sides  so  cleaned 


1 88  The  Romance  of  a  Great  Store 

and  polished,  that  one  might  see  his  face  reflected 
mirror-like  upon  them,  the  horses  to  the  last  state  of 
perfection — this  is  the  Macy  standard  of  delivery.  A 
Macy  truck  and  wagon  is  designed  to  be  one  of  the 
store's  best  advertisements. 

A  skillful  trucking  contractor  from  the  lower  west 
side  of  New  York  went  to  a  department-store  owner 
a  dozen  years  or  more  ago  and  said: 

"Mr.  A ,  after  a  little  study  of  your  delivery 

service,  I  am  convinced  that  if  you  would  turn  it  over 
to  me,  I  could  save  you  more  than  fifty  per  cent,  in  its 
operation." 

Mr.  A was  a  pretty  hard-headed  business  man, 

"hard-boiled"  is  the  word  that  might  well  be  used  to 
describe  him.  He  turned  quickly  to  the  contractor. 

"You  interest  me,"  said  he.  "How  would  you  pro- 
pose to  do  it?" 

"At  the  outset,  by  making  the  wagon  equipment  a 
little  less  elaborate.  It  could  be  just  as  efficient  with- 
out so  much  varnish  and  brass  and  gold-stripe." 

Mr.  A shook  his  head  negatively. 

"Oh,  no,"  he  said,  "we  know  that  much  ourselves. 
If  we  were  to  do  that,  we  should  lose  fifty  per  cent,  of 
our  advertisement  upon  the  streets  of  New  York." 

We  have  left  milady's  package  where  she  left  it,  in 
the  hands  of  the  salesclerk  who  sold  it  to  her.  The 
purchaser  does  not  see  it  thereafter,  not  at  least  until 
it  has  come  to  her  home.  With  an  astonishing  celerity 
and  according  to  a  carefully  set-down  program  and 
practice  it  is  wrapped  right  within  the  floor  upon  which 


Distributing  the  Goods  189 

the  selling  department  is  situated,  and  then  dropped 
into  a  chute  which  leads  with  a  straight,  swift  run  into 
that  nether  world  of  Macy's — the  basement  headquar- 
ters of  the  delivery  department.  In  reality  this  chute 
is  a  carrier,  so  designed  as  to  carry  the  small  individual 
packages  with  safety  and  order,  as  well  as  with  celerity. 

There  are  fourteen  of  these  conveyors,  coming  down 
from  all  the  selling  floors  save  that  of  furniture  which 
has  its  own  special  delivery  organization  on  the  ninth 
floor.  Together  they  pour  their  almost  constant  stream 
of  merchandise  upon  the  so-called  "revolving-ring"  in 
the  very  center  of  the  basement  floor.  This  "revolv- 
ing-ring," in  purpose  very  much  like  the  great  and 
slowly  revolving  disc-like  wooden  wheels  used  in  the 
freight  stations  of  the  express  companies  for  a  similar 
service,  is,  in  reality,  much  larger  than  they.  It  is  a 
"square-ring" — if  I  may  use  that  paradoxical  phrase — 
built  of  four  slowly  moving  conveyor  belts  upon  which 
a  package  may  travel  an  indefinite  number  of  round- 
trips.  At  various  points  upon  the  outer  edge  of  this 
moving  square  the  conveyor  chutes  drop  their  mer- 
chandise. Near  the  center  are  the  wide-open  mouths 
of  other  conveyors,  which  lead  to  distant  corners  of  the 
basement. 

The  nimble-fingered  and  nimble-witted  young  men 
who  stand  within  the  "revolving-ring"  feed  the 
packages  from  it  into  these  last  conveyors.  To  each 
individual  package  is  affixed  a  duplicate  portion  of  the 
leaf  of  the  salesbook.  On  it  the  salesclerk  has  written, 
or  printed,  the  address  to  which  the  merchandise  is  to 
go,  the  cost,  whether  or  not  it  is  collect  on  delivery 


190  The  Romance  of  a  Great  Store 

(known  hereafter  in  this  telling  as  C.  O.  D.)  and  other 
essential  information.  It  is  the  addresses,  however, 
which  attract  the  eyes  of  the  genii  of  the  "revolving- 
ring."  In  their  minds  these  fall  into  four  great  cate- 
gories: City,  meaning  those  portions  of  Manhattan 
Island  south  of  Seventy-second  Street  on  the  east  side 
and  Ninety-ninth  Street  on  the  westj  Harlem  and  the 
Bronx,  the  incorporated  city  of  New  York  north  of 
those  two  streets;  Brooklyn  and  New  Jersey — self- 
explanatory  j  and  Suburban:  all  the  rest  of  the  territory 
within  the  far-flung  limits  of  Macy's  own  generously 
wide  delivery  service.  While  for  those  points  that  are 
unfortunate  enough  to  lie  just  outside  of  it — Boston 
or  Philadelphia  or  Kamchatka  or  Manila  (There 
hardly  is  an  address  to  stagger  the  Macy  delivery 
department) — the  packages  go  direct  to  the  shipping 
room,  in  its  own  corner  of  the  basement. 

Here  these  last  are  checked  and  wrapped  for  long- 
distance shipment.  They  are  checked  against  the  pay- 
ment or  the  non-payment  of  transportation  charges 5 
the  store  has  very  definite  rules  of  its  own.  A  paid 
purchase  of  but  $2.50  is  entitled  to  free  delivery  within 
any  of  the  Eastern  States,  of  $5  and  over  to  any  of  the 
Middle  States  as  well,  of  $10  and  over  to  any  corner 
of  the  whole  United  States.  Freight  and  express  pre- 
payments are  arranged  upon  a  somewhat  similar  basis. 
The  majority  of  the  long-distance  shipments  go  by 
parcel  post,  however.  Still,  in  the  course  of  a  twelve- 
month, there  are  enough  to  go  both  by  express  and 
freight  to  make  a  pretty  considerable  transportation 
bill  in  themselves. 


Distributing  the  Goods  191 

Again  we  have  neglected  that  precious  package  of 
milady's.  It  may  be  only  an  extra  pair  of  corset- 
laces — in  which  case  the  saleswoman  must  have  sug- 
gested that  madam  herself  transport  it  to  her  habitat — 
or  it  may  be  an  eight  or  ten-yard  piece  of  heavy  silk 
for  her  new  evening  gown,  or  the  evening  gown  itself. 
In  any  case  it  receives  the  same  care  and  attention.  We 
have  already  seen  how  it  is  packed,  sent  through  the 
conveyor-chute  down  into  the  basement  and  then  upon 
the  "revolving-ring"  before  the  nimble  eyes  of  the 
men  with  nimble  hands  and  wits  as  well. 

Milady  lives  in  West  One  Hundred  and  Fourth 
Street.  The  sorter's  eyes  catch  that  much  from  the 
address  slip,  torn  originally  from  the  salesclerk's  book 
and  pasted  upon  the  package's  outer  wrappings. 
"Harlem"  his  mind  reports  back  to  his  eyes.  Into  the 
chute-entrance  labeled  "Harlem  and  The  Bronx"  goes 
the  package. 

"Harlem  and  The  Bronx"  is  a  sizable  room  for  itself. 
The  further  end  of  the  second  conveyor  to  receive 
milady's  precious  package  rests  upon  a  table  in  its  very 
center.  Roundabout  the  table  are  small  compartments 
or  bins,  each  about  the  size  of  a  small  packing  case; 
each  numbered  and  corresponding  to  a  definite  wagon 
route  or  run.  Run  No.  87  (the  number  is  purely 
fictitious)  takes  in  West  One  Hundred  and  Fourth 
Street.  Into  compartment  No.  87  goes  milady's 
packages.  But  not,  of  course,  until  the  clerical  young 
man  technically  known  as  the  sheet-writer  has  made  a 
record  of  it.  Into  his  records,  also,  go  all  the  other 
packages  destined  that  day  for  that  particular  room. 


192  The  Romance  of  a  Great  Store 

If  there  should  be,  as  sometimes  happens,  an  overplus 
of  packages  for  the  single  run,  then  it  is  the  business 
of  one  of  the  assistant  superintendents  of  delivery  to 
meet  the  emergency  either  by  stretching  momentarily 
the  runs  of  the  adjoining  routes  or  by  sending  a  special 
wagon  up  from  the  main  store.  Experience  and  judg- 
ment must  cut  the  cloth  to  fit  the  case. 

Under  any  ordinary  procedure  milady's  package  will 
go  out  early  in  the  morning  of  the  day  following  her 
purchase.  That,  at  least,  is  the  store's  ordinary  guar- 
antee of  delivery.  As  a  matter  of  fact,  it  does  far 
better  than  this.  On  ordinary  days,  when  weather  and 
street  conditions  in  Manhattan  have  not  gone  in  con- 
ditions of  near-impassability,  there  are  at  least  two 
regular  deliveries  to  every  part  of  the  island  south  of 
One  Hundred  and  Fifty-fifth  Street,  with  a  single  one 
at  least  to  every  other  part  of  Manhattan,  Brooklyn 
and  the  Bronx,  to  say  nothing  of  the  downtown  portions 
of  Jersey  City  and  Hoboken.  Easily  said,  this  thing. 
But  when  one  comes  to  realize  how  tremendously  wide- 
spread the  metropolitan  district  of  Greater  New  York 
is  these  days,  the  performance  of  it  becomes  a  trans- 
portation marvel,  a  masterpiece  of  organization. 

I  shall  not  bore  you  with  a  description  of  the  printed 
forms,  the  checks  and  counter  checks  that  accompany 
the  delivery  of  milady's  package.  It  is  enough  to 
say  that  they  are  both  complete  and  necessary.  The 
complications  of  C.  O.  D.  add  greatly  to  their 
perplexities.  For,  discourage  it  as  they  may  and  do,  the 
department-store  owners  of  New  York  never  have  been 
able  to  wean  milady  from  the  joys  of  this  method  of 


Distributing  the  Goods  193 

shopping.  When  she  says  "C.  O.  D."  in  Macy's  the 
salesclerk  immediately  and  courteously  replies:  "Have 
you  tried  having  a  depositor's  account,  madam?"  A 
good  many  of  them  have,  and  all  who  have  have  liked 
the  method.  Yet  the  C.  O.  D.  still  has  its  great  appeal. 
And  out  of  all  the  deliveries  from  the  big  store  in 
Herald  Square  more  than  half  of  them  are  collect-on- 
delivery.  This  means,  in  turn,  a  good  deal  of  com- 
plication for  the  delivery  department.  Its  drivers 
have  to  be  cashiers,  in  miniature.  When  they  report 
at  the  main  store  at  half -past  seven  in  the  morning, 
each  is  furnished  with  five  dollars  in  change  j  a  sum 
which  is  doubled  in  the  case  of  the  suburban  drivers. 
Moreover,  for  the  correct  handling  of  the  forms,  a 
double  amount  of  care  and  understanding  is  required. 
One  does  not  wonder  that  the  department-store  pro- 
prietors discourage  the  C.  O.  D. 

Yet  it  all  requires  a  high  type  of  wagon  representa- 
tive. Hardly  less  than  the  salesclerk  does  the  wagon 
driver  of  the  store  have  it  in  his  power  to  make  or  lose 
friends  for  his  house.  His  is  no  small  opportunity  for 
real  salesmanship.  The  big  stores  realize  this,  and 
select  these  men  with  great  care  and  discernment. 
They  know  that  the  man  who  shouts  "Macy's"  up  the 
areaway  or  elevator-shaft  once  or  twice  a  week  is  apt 
to  become  the  same  sort  of  good  family  friend  and  ally 
as  the  iceman  or  the  butcher's  boy.  The  man  knows 
that,  too:  particularly  in  the  vicinity  of  Christmas  week. 
His  own  trials  are  many  and  varied.  Apartment  house 
superintendents  and  janitors,  with  prejudices  of  their 
own,  are  rarely  co-operative,  generally  obstructive,  in 


194  The  Romance  of  a  Great  Store 

fact.  Some  people — even  store  patrons — are  naturally 
mean.  They  take  out  all  their  meanness  upon  the 
department-store  man  who,  because  of  his  very  position, 
is  unable  to  strike  back. 

Yet  the  job  has  its  compensations,  aside  from  the 
warm  remembrances  of  the  holiday  season.  People, 
in  the  main,  are  decent  after  all.  If  Mrs.  Jinks,  who 
lives  in  Albemarle  Road,  Flatbush,  is  out  at  the  matinee 
or  the  movies  for  the  afternoon,  Mrs.  Blinks,  who  lives 
next  door,  will  take  in  her  packages.  The  Macy  man 
has  been  long  enough  on  the  route  to  know  that  by  this 
time.  Such  knowledge  is  a  part  of  his  stock  in  trade. 
He  must  not  only  know  the  regular  patrons  of  the 
store,  but  all  of  their  neighbors.  While  by  the  correct 
and  courteous  handling  of  both  he  may  not  only  retain 
trade  for  it  but  bring  new  customers  to  its  doors. 

Let  us  now  suppose  that  milady  does  not  live  in 
either  Manhattan,  Brooklyn  or  the  Bronx,  but  in  one 
of  those  smart  suburbs:  Forest  Hills,  New  Rochelle, 
Englewood  or  the  Oranges,  to  pick  four  or  five  out  of 
many.  She  still  is  well  within  the  limits  of  Macy's 
own  delivery  service.  If  she  lives  in  the  first  of 
these — Forest  Hills — she  will  be  served,  not  direct 
from  the  Herald  Square  establishment,  but  from  the 
little  Long  Island  community  of  Queens.  Fifteen 
wagon  and  motor  truck  routes  run  from  the  Macy  sub- 
station there,  which  in  turn  is  fed  by  the  merchandise 
coming  out  over  the  great  Queensborough  bridge,  each 
evening,  on  heavy  five-ton  trucks.  And,  to  go  back 
even  further,  these  have  been  filled  from  the  super- 


Distributing  the  Goods  195 

sized  compartments  at  the  end  of  the  conveyor-chute 
marked  "Suburban." 

Similarly,  if  she  dwell  in  New  Rochelle,  she  will  be 
served  by  one  of  the  fifteen  motor  trucks  running  out 
from  the  sub-station  at  Woodlawn,  remembered  by 
travelers  upon  the  trains  to  Boston  chiefly  as  the  place 
of  the  enormous  cemetery.  It  serves  the  great  sub- 
urban territory  north  of  the  direct  delivery  routes  out 
from  the  main  store — a  line  drawn  through  Kings- 
bridge  and  Pelham  Avenue — out  as  far  as  Ossining, 
Mt.  Kisco  and  Stamford. 

Englewood  and  the  New  Jersey  territory  roundabout 
are  served  by  Macy's  Hackensack  sub-station,  with  nine 
more  routes  $  while  the  Oranges,  mighty  Newark, 
Montclair  and  that  immediate  vicinage  draws  its  mer- 
chandise through  a  fourth  sub-station,  right  in  the  heart 
of  Newark,  itself,  and  operating  ten  regular  motor 
truck  routes.  The  fifth  and  last  all-the-year  sub- 
station is  at  West  New  Brighton,  Staten  Island.  It 
serves  that  far-flung  and  least  populated  of  New 
York's  five  boroughs,  Richmond. 

In  the  summer  months  another  sub-station  is  added 
to  the  list,  at  Seabright,  down  on  the  New  Jersey  coast, 
and  serving  all  those  populous  resorts  from  the  Atlantic 
Highlands  on  the  north  to  Spring  Lake  on  the  south. 
This  is  an  expensive  feature  of  Macy  service,  and  one 
for  which  the  store  receives  no  extra  compensation. 
It  is  one  of  the  many  expensive  things  that  must  be 
charged  to  profit-and-loss  or  the  somewhat  indefinite 
"overhead" — indefinite  enough  when  one  comes  to  con- 
sider its  ramifications,  but  always  fairly  definite  in  its 


196  The  Romance  of  a  Great  Stor<> 

drain  upon  the  daily  financial  balances  of  the  store. 

At  each  of  these  sub-stations  there  are,  in  addition  to 
the  fairly  obvious  necessary  facilities  for  re-sorting  the 
merchandise,  complete  garage  facilities  for  the  wagons 
and  trucks  running  out  from  them;  these,  of  course, 
are  in  addition  to  the  store's  main  stables  and  garages 
in  West  Nineteenth  Street  and  also  in  West  Thirty- 
eighth,  Manhattan.  Together  all  of  these  form  a  very 
considerable  fleet  upon  wheels,  with  a  personnel  in 
keeping.  For  the  delivery  routes  alone,  and  taking  no 
account  of  the  sizable  force  employed  in  the  upkeep  of 
vehicles  and  horses,  there  are  employed,  in  the  city 
service  of  the  store,  one  hundred  and  ninety  drivers 
and  chauffeurs,  with  one  hundred  and  eighty-six 
helpers,  and  in  the  suburban  service,  seventy-four 
drivers  and  eighty-six  helpers. 

Through  the  hands  of  these  there  pours  a  constant 
and  a  terrific  stream  of  merchandise.  The  conveying 
system  in  the  basement  of  the  Herald  Square  store  has 
a  generous  maximum  carrying  capacity  of  five  thousand 
packages  an  hour — a  capacity  which  sometimes  is 
actually  reached  toward  the  close  of  an  exceptionally 
busy  day,  say  toward  the  end  of  the  pre-Christmas 
season.  Twenty-five  thousand  packages  is  an  average 
day's  work  for  that  basement  room;  upon  occasion  it 
has  gone  well  over  forty-one  thousand.  It  should  be 
borne  in  mind,  moreover,  that  a  package  does  not 
always  represent  a  single  purchase;  in  fact,  it  rarely 
does.  Inside  of  one  assembled  package — generally 
assembled,  as  we  saw  in  a  previous  chapter,  at  the  store's 
transfer  desk — there  may  be  all  the  way.  from  two  to 


Distributing  the  Goods  197 

ten  separate  parcels.     You  may  take  your  own  guess  as 
to  the  average  number. 

Here,  then,  is  the  great  and  complicated  system  in 
its  simplest  form.  Its  ramifications  are  many  and 
astonishing.  For  instance,  milady  is  apt  at  times  to 
change  her  mind.  Yes,  she  is.  And  send  the  package 
back.  Even  though  not  as  often  in  Macy's  as  in  the 
charge  account  stores.  Here  is  another  decided  benefit 
in  the  cash  system — not  alone  to  the  store,  but,  because 
of  its  habit  of  passing  on  its  economies,  to  its  patrons 
as  well.  Yet  in  the  course  of  a  year  a  considerable 
number  of  packages  must  come  back.  Despite  a 
thorough  educational  system  and  constant  oversight  and 
admonition  there  is  bound  to  be  a  percentage  of  incor- 
rect address  slips.  These  and  other  causes  produce  a 
certain  definite  return  flow  of  merchandise  ;  which  must 
have  its  own  forms  and  safeguards,  for  the  protection 
both  of  the  store  and  its  customer.  They  all  make 
detail,  but  extremely  necessary  detail. 

In  the  basement  there  is  a  store  room  whose  broad 
shelves  hold  a  variety  of  merchandise,  bought  and  paid 
for,  but  never  delivered.  The  store  makes  at  least 
two  attempts  to  deliver  every  article  given  to  its 
delivery  department.  That  department  is  unusually 
clever  with  telephone  books,  club  lists  and  other  less 
used  avenues  of  finding  recalcitrant  addresses.  But 
there  come  times  when  even  its  resourcefulness  is 
entirely  baffled.  Then  the  undelivered  goods  must  go 
to  the  store  room  until  some  properly  accredited  human 
being  comes  up  somewhere,  sometime  to  demand  them. 


198  The  Romance  of  a  Great  Store 

In  an  astonishing  number  of  cases  the  some  one  does  not 
come  up  sometime  or  somewhere.  In  such  a  case  after 
a  fair  length  of  time  the  goods  themselves  go  back  to 
stock.  But  the  record  of  the  transaction  stays  accessible 
in  the  store's  files,  so  that  its  bureau  of  investigation,  at 
any  future  time,  may  order  a  duplicate  of  the  lost  ship- 
ment out  of  the  stock — out  of  the  open  market  if  the 
stock  then  fails  to  hold  it — in  order  that  Macy's  may 
keep  full  faith  with  its  patrons. 

Such  a  holdover  is,  of  course,  to  be  entirely  distin- 
guished from  those  which  are  held  in  advance  of 
delivery j  in  certain  cases  up  to  thirty  days  without 
advance  payment,  in  others  up  to  sixty  upon  partial 
payment  and  in  still  others  up  to  six  months  after  full 
payment.  This  last,  however,  is  a  merchandising 
procedure  quite  common  to  most  retail  establishments. 

One  feature  of  the  delivery  department  remains  for 
our  consideration}  the  branch  of  it  which  is  situated 
upon  the  ninth  floor  and  which,  oddly  enough,  handles 
the  heaviest  merchandise  shipped  out  of  the  store — 
furniture.  There  are,  of  course,  heavy  shipments  that 
go  out  of  the  basements — hundreds  of  them  on  an 
average  that  are  entirely  too  heavy  for  the  conveyor- 
chutes  and  the  "revolving-ring."  A  notable  one  of 
these  is  an  electric  washing-machine,  which,  crated,  will 
weigh  slightly  in  excess  of  two  hundred  pounds. 
Shipments  such  as  these  go  to  the  basement  on  hand 
trucks  and  by  the  freight  elevators.  There  they  are 
boxed  and  crated;  often  a  considerable  job.  As  a  rule 
the  expert  packers  of  the  delivery  department  can  put 


Distributing  the  Goods  199 

even  a  fairly  sizable  or  unwieldy  purchase  into  boxing 
within  twelve  or  fifteen  minutes  j  an  elaborate  and 
fragile  bit  of  statuary  has  been  known  to  take  a  full 
hour  and  a  half  before  it  was  safely  prepared  for  wagon 
shipment. 

Likewise  the  furniture  craters  upon  the  ninth  floor 
of  times  find  their  job  a  sizable  one  indeed.  The  box- 
ing of  a  divan  or  a  dining-room  table  is  no  easy  task 
whatsoever.  And  in  cases  where  the  delivery  is  to  be 
made  within  the  limits  of  Macy  service  it  is  often 
avoided  entirely.  The  freight  elevators  of  the  store 
are  of  the  largest  size  ever  designed  j  so  big  that  a 
heavy  motor  truck  is  no  particular  strain  upon  their 
individual  capacity.  One  of  these  trucks  can  be  and  is 
driven  straight  to  and  from  the  ninth  floor.  After  it 
has  reached  the  department  the  placing  of  fine  furniture 
in  its  cavernous  interior  is  merely  a  nicety  of  planning 
and  arrangement,  a  skillful  use  of  ropes  and  blankets 
and  padding.  The  truck  may  run  to  any  point  within 
forty  or  fifty  miles  of  the  store  at  less  cost  than  crating} 
even  though  crating  be  done  at  cost,  itself. 

So  spread  the  tentacles  of  Macy's,  those  long  arms  of 
distribution  that  keep  the  store  from  ever  being  a 
merely  abstract  thing.  The  bright  red  and  yellow 
wagons  and  trucks — each  bearing  its  good-luck  symbol 
of  the  red  star — carry  Herald  Square  to  the  far  limits 
of  a  far-flung  city.  The  men  who  ride  them  are  upon 
the  outposts  of  salesmanship.  Yet  through  system 
and  through  organization  they  are  forever  closely  con- 
nected with  it.  The  blood  that  courses  through  your 


2OO  The  Romance  of  a  Great  Store 

finger-tips  comes  straight  from  your  heart.  The  life- 
blood  of  understanding,  of  enthusiasm,  of  morale,  that 
Macy's  outriders  bring  with  them  is  the  life-blood  of 
the  humanized  machine  that  functions  so  steadily  there 
in  the  heart  of  Manhattan. 


VI.     The  Macy  Family 

IN  the  bazaars  of  ancient  Bagdad,  the  human  factor 
was  not  only  the  great  but  the  sole  dominating 
influence.  The  ancient  Bagdadians,  including  those 
commuters  and  suburbanites,  far  and  near,  who  came 
cameling  into  town  at  more  or  less  frequent  intervals, 
did  business,  not  with  a  machine,  not  with  a  system, 
but  with  men.  Which,  being  freely  translated,  meant 
bargaining.  They  not  merely  bargained,  but  haggled, 
and  haggled  at  great  length.  Prices?  There  were 
none.  The  price  was  what  you  made  it — you  and  the 
merchant  with  whom  you  finally  came  to  agreement  j 
if  finally  you  did  come  to  agreement. 

In  the  great  bazaars  of  the  modern  Bagdad  one  does 
not  need  to  bargain  or  to  haggle.  One  is  doing  busi- 
ness primarily  with  a  system.  Prices  are  fixed,  and 
firmly  fixed.  This  is  so  generally  understood  and 
accepted  a  rule  today  that  it  would  be  a  mere  waste  of 
time  to  discuss  it  at  further  length,  save  possibly  to 
recall  once  again  the  large  part  which  Rowland  Hussey 
Macy  and  the  men  who  followed  him  played  in  giving 
a  Gibraltar-like  firmness  to  this  solid  modern  business 
principle. 

Yet  even  in  these  same  modern,  scientifically  organ- 
ized bazaars  of  today,  the  system  rarely  ever  can  be 

201 


2O2  The  Romance  of  a  Great  Store 

better  than  the  men  who  direct  it.  Four  thousand 
years  of  business  progress  between  the  two  Bagdads 
have  not  taken  from  man  his  God-given  power  to  make 
or  break  the  best  of  systems.  And  Macy's,  with  its 
own  business  system  organized,  carefully  developed 
and  upbuilded  through  sixty-three  long  years,  is  still 
dependent  to  no  little  degree  upon  the  faith  and 
loyalty  and  interest  of  its  men  and  women  j  that  same 
thing  which  in  the  days  of  the  war  just  past  we  first 
learned  to  know  by  that  new  name — morale. 

Under  the  sign  of  the  Red  Star  there  are  at  all  times 
these  days  not  less  than  five  thousand  workers  j  in  the 
Christmas  season  this  pay-roll  list  runs  quickly  to  seven 
thousand  or  over.  Then  it  is  that  the  Macy  family 
takes  its  most  impressive  dimensions.  Seven  thousand 
souls!  It  is  the  population  of  a  good  sized  town!  It 
is  four  good  regiments — it  is  the  New  York  Hippo- 
drome with  every  one  of  its  seats  filled  and  eighteen 
hundred  folk  left  standing  up! 

Yet  even  the  all-the-year  minimum  of  five  thousand 
men  and  women — roughly  speaking,  one-third  men 
and  two-thirds  women — is  an  impressive  array.  It  is 
a  human  force  which  only  gains  impressiveness  when, 
one  finds  that  all  but  three  hundred  of  it  are  employed 
beneath  a  single  roof.  The  small  outside  group  chiefly 
comprises  those  in  the  delivery  stations. 

To  bring  action,  foresight,  co-operation,  correlation — 
and  finally  morale — into  such  a  force  is  a  thing  not 
gained  by  merely  talking  or  thinking  about  it,  but  by 
long  study,  experimentation  and  great  continued  effort. 


The  Macy  Family  203 

Which  means,  in  turn,  that  Macy's,  among  several 
other  things,  is  a  responsibility.  For,  as  we  shall 
presently  see,  there  are  any  number  of  problems  in 
addition  to  those  of  buying  and  selling j  problems  in 
the  solving  of  which  unceasing  demands  are  made  upon 
the  store's  time,  money  and  heart.  It  is,  in  the  last 
analysis  a  matter  of  mere  good  business  at  that.  Yet 
at  Macy's  it  has  been  considerably  more.  And  the 
store's  satisfaction  in  realizing  that  it  was  a  very  early 
and  a  very  advanced  pioneer  in  developing  personnel — 
and  morale — as  necessary  factors  in  modern  mer- 
chandising is  a  very  large  one  indeed. 

A  machine  or  a  family — or  a  department-store — is 
only  as  good  as  its  component  parts,  and  by  the  fact 
that  there  is  a  strict  interdependence  between  the  whole 
and  its  parts,  the  success  of  Macy's  must  mean  that  the 
rank  and  file  of  its  employees  maintain  a  high  average 
of  intelligence,  initiative  and  loyalty.  That  these 
qualities  are  successfully  co-ordinated  in  Macy's  is  due 
to  real  leadership,  and  it  is  to  this  same  leadership  that 
we  may  look  for  the  basis  of  the  store's  morale. 

Little  things  indicate.  And  indicate  clearly.  Here 
on  the  wall  of  the  passageway  at  the  head  of  the  main 
employee's  stair  is  a  placard  which  reads: 

"Once  each  month  three  prizes  are  given  to  the 
employees  who  make  the  best  suggestions  for  the  better- 
ment of  store  service  or  conditions.  Don't  hesitate  to 
try  for  a  prize,  even  if  your  suggestion  does  not  appear 
important.  We  need  your  ideas  and  like  to  have  as 
many  as  possible  presented  each  month.  Write  plainly 


204  The  Romance  of  a  Great  Store 

and  drop  your  suggestions  in  the  boxes  furnished  for 
this  purpose.  The  first  prize  is  $10.00,  the  second 
$5.00,  and  the  third  $2.00." 

Here  is  only  a  single  one  of  the  many  evidences  of 
Macy  co-operation  with  the  employees.  Yet  it  illus- 
trates clearly  the  house's  policy  of  making  its  workers 
feel  an  interest  in  and  beyond  the  mere  amount  of 
money  that  they  draw  at  the  end  of  the  week.  Not  a 
few  of  these  prizes  are  awarded  for  suggestions  as  to 
procedure  in  technical  matters  relating  to  the  details  of 
the  business.  Some  of  them  result  in  the  saving  of 
time — and  consequently  money — and  others  in  the 
improvement  of  working  conditions.  For  example: 
ten  dollars  was  awarded  to  the  man  who  suggested  that 
the  doors  of  fitting-rooms  be  equipped  with  signals  to 
show  whether  or  not  they  are  occupied  $  five  dollars 
went  to  the  one  who  made  the  suggestion  that  the  fire- 
axe  and  hook  standing  in  the  corner  of  the  customers' 
stairway  be  placed  on  the  wall  in  a  suitable  case  so  that 
children  could  not  play  with  themj  two  dollars  to  her 
who  advanced  the  very  reasonable  idea  that  a  scratch- 
pad in  the  'phone  booths  would  prevent  memoranda 
and  art  manifestations  being  made  upon  the  walls. 
Here  are  a  few  suggestions  that  were  proffered  and 
acted  upon.  The  entire  list  runs  to  a  considerable 
length. 

There  is  another  notice  upon  the  big  bulletin  board 
at  the  head  of  the  employees'  stairs — a  sort  of  town- 
crier  affair  with  temporary  and  permanent  notices  of 
interest  to  the  store's  workers — which  tells  the  working 
force  that  when  vacancies  occur  within  the  big  store 


The  Macy  Family 

they  will  be  promptly  posted  on  this  and  other  bulletin 
boards.  The  workers  are  advised  to  apply  for  any 
position  which  they  may  feel  they  are  competent  to 
fill.  Ambition  is  not  curbed  in  Macy's.  On  the 
contrary,  it  is  stimulated  to  every  possible  extent.  The 
employee  is  restricted  only  by  his  own  limitations,  if 
he  has  them.  It  is  a  firmly-fixed  house  policy  to  pro- 
mote, wherever  it  is  at  all  possible,  from  its  own  ranks. 
Among  its  high-salaried  men  and  women  are  not  a  few 
who  have  worked  their  way  up  from  the  bottom.  In 
fact,  among  these  six  or  eight  of  the  best  paid  men  in 
the  store,  is  one  who  boasts  that  he  first  came  to  New 
York  fifteen  years  ago,  with  but  a  suitcase  and  eleven 
dollars  in  his  pocket. 

The  employment  department  must  have  been  very 
much  on  the  job  when  it  hired  this  man.  It  generally 
is  very  much  on  its  job. 

Obviously,  the  hiring  of  workers  for  an  enterprise 
as  huge  as  Macy's  cannot  be  conducted  on  any  hit-and- 
miss  plan.  We  have  gone  far  enough  with  the  store  in 
these  pages  to  see  that  hit-and-miss  does  not  figure  at 
any  time  or  place  in  its  varied  functionings — and  no- 
where less  than  in  its  employment  department.  The 
hiring  of  new  workers  for  the  store  is  indeed  a  branch 
of  the  business  machine  that  receives  constant  and  great 
care  and  systematic  attention.  A  store  must  employ 
the  right  sort  of  people  in  order  to  be  a  good  store. 
This  is  fairly  axiomatic  these  days. 

These  workers  are  gathered  in  a  variety  of  ways — 
by  volunteer  applications,  by  newspaper  advertisements 
(in  New  York  and  outside  of  it),  by  outside  free 


206  The  Romance  of  a  Great  Store 

employment  agencies,  by  circular  appeals  generally  to 
educational  institutions,  and,  best  of  all,  through  the 
solicitation  of  its  regular  employees.  There  is  no 
appeal  for  a  worker  that,  in  my  opinion,  can  compare 
with  the  suggestion  made  by  an  employee  that  the  place 
of  his  or  her  employment  is  a  good  place  for  his  or  her 
friends,  as  well. 

I  am  warmly  concurred  with  in  this  opinion  by  the 
store's  employment  manager,  a  big,  upstanding  man, 
who  in  his  Harvard  days  was  a  famous  football  player. 
The  rules  of  that  fine  game  he  has  brought  to  the 
understanding  of  his  present  problem. 

"One  of  the  most  desirable  class  of  applicants  is  that 
brought  by  our  own  employees,"  he  says,  frankly,  "as 
in  hiring  these  people  we  have  a  feeling  of  security} 
especially  if  they  have  been  brought  in  by  some  of  the 
old  and  most  loyal  employees.  It  has  been  our  experi- 
ence that  such  applicants  enter  more  readily  into  the 
spirit  of  their  work  and  develop  more  rapidly  than 
those  obtained  from  other  sources.  We  advertise  in 
the  classified  columns  of  the  newspapers  only  when  it 
is  absolutely  necessary.  Our  regular  daily  advertise- 
ments keep  the  store  constantly  before  the  public  eye — 
and  generally  that  is  enough. 

"During  the  recent  war  period,  however,  we  had  no 
scruples  about  advertising,  as  nearly  every  other  line  of 
endeavor  was  in  the  same  boat  as  we.  Never  before 
have  the  newspapers  carried  so  much  classified  adver- 
tising. Yet  when  all  is  said  and  done,  besides  the 
moral  undesirability  of  this  source  of  supply,  we  found 
it  also  very  expensive  indeed. 


The  Macy  Family  207 

"Some  people  believe  that  the  function  of  an  employ- 
ment department  is  merely  to  keep  in  touch  with  the 
labor  market  and  engage  employees,"  he  continued. 
"This  is  erroneous.  The  duty  of  this  employment 
department  is  to  raise  the  standard  of  efficiency  of  the 
whole  working  force  by  the  proper  selection,  placing, 
following  up  and  promotion  of  employees  and  so  bring- 
ing about  a  condition  that  will  result  in  their  rendering 
as  nearly  as  possible  one  hundred  per  cent,  service  to 
the  store.  That  is  the  real  reason  why  employment 
departments  such  as  this  first  came  into  existence. 
Business  some  years  ago  awoke  to  the  realization  of  the 
fact  that  its  indiscriminate  handling  of  the  entire  labor 
problem  was  causing  a  tremendous  economic  waste,  not 
alone  to  the  employee  and  to  society,  but  to  itself.  It 
then  began  for  the  first  time  to  deal  with  the  problem 
of  its  personnel  in  a  scientific  and  practical  way." 

The  market  for  workers — like  pretty  nearly  every 
other  sort  of  market — is,  as  we  have  just  seen,  subject 
to  fluctuations  j  there  are  seasons  when  the  employment 
manager — ranking  as  the  store's  fourth  assistant  general 
manager — must  look  sharply  about  him  for  the  main- 
tenance of  its  ranks,  other  seasons  when  long  files  of 
would-be  workers  present  themselves  each  morning  at 
his  department  doors.  For  the  five  or  six  years  of  the 
World  War  period  the  first  set  of  conditions  prevailed. 
It  was  difficult  for  any  department-store,  ranked  by  the 
Washington  authorities  in  war  days  as  a  non-essential 
industry,  always  to  maintain  its  full  working  force,  to 
say  nothing  of  its  morale.  Recently  the  pendulum 


2o8  The  Romance  of  a  Great  Store 

has  swung  in  the  other  direction.  America  is  not 
exempt  from  the  labor  conditions  which  are  prevailing 
in  the  other  great  nations  of  the  world.  And  there  are 
plenty  of  people  who  would  work  in  Macy's.  Yet  the 
store  has  refused  to  use  this  situation  as  a  club  over  its 
workers.  Throughout  the  darkest  days  of  the  business 
depression  it  told  them  that  it  had  no  intention  either 
of  reducing  its  force  of  workers  (beyond  the  usual 
lay-off  of  extra  Christmas  people)  or  of  reducing  their 
individual  salaries.  Which  was  a  considerable  help  to 
its  Esprit  de  corps. 

Yet  even  in  the  hardest  days  of  labor  shortage  Macy's 
never  ceased  to  be  most  particular  as  to  the  quality  of 
its  help.  Applicants  for  positions  underneath  its  roof 
were  scrutinized  with  great  care  to  make  sure  as  to  their 
desirability  as  additions  to  the  organization.  And 
before  they  finally  were  accepted  and  turned  over  to 
the  training  school,  they  were  examined,  with  as  much 
thoroughness  as  if  there  were  hundreds  of  others  in  the 
file  behind  them,  from  whom  the  store  might  pick  and 
choose. 

All  this  is  part  and  parcel  of  the  definite  manage- 
ment policy  of  the  employment  department,  just  as  it 
is  part  of  its  policy  to  make  sure  that  the  prospective 
member  of  the  Macy  family  has  more  than  one  arrow 
to  his  or  her  quiver.  Alternate  capabilities  are  assets 
not  to  be  scorned.  And  there  is  an  obvious  store 
flexibility  in  being  able  to  use  its  human  units  in  a 
variety  of  endeavor  that  the  management  can  hardly 
afford  to  ignore.  And  it  does  not. 


The  Macy  Family  209 

There  is  a  function  of  the  employment  department 
of  the  modern  business  machine  that  Macy's  recognizes 
as  second  in  importance  only  to  that  of  engaging  its 
workers.  I  am  referring  to  that  moment  when  they 
may  leave  its  employ,  either  from  choice  or  otherwise. 
If  "otherwise" — in  the  colloquial  phrasing  of  the  store 
being  "laid-off" — there  is  the  greatest  of  care  and 
discretion  used. 

"Remember  the  Golden  Rule,"  says  its  general 
manager  to  his  assistants,  and  says  it  again  and  again. 
"Do  unto  others  as  you  would  have  them  do  unto  you. 
And  remember  that  there  is  never  a  time  when  this 
Golden  Rule  is  more  necessary  or  applicable  in  business 
than  in  the  moment  of  discharge." 

Translated  into  the  terms  of  hard  fact  this  means 
that  in  Macy's  no  buyer,  no  department  head,  no  de- 
partment manager  has  the  power  to  dismiss  one  of  his 
workers.  He  may  recommend  the  "lay-off"  but  only 
the  general  manager  himself  may  actually  accomplish 
the  act.  In  which  case  he  first  refers  the  case  to  one 
of  his  five  assistants,  for  personal  investigation  and 
recommendation. 

When  the  saleswoman — or  man,  as  the  case  may 
be — leaves  of  her  own  volition  the  matter  becomes,  in 
certain  senses,  more  serious.  Why  is  she  dissatisfied? 
Are  the  conditions  of  labor  more  onerous  at  Macy's 
than  in  the  other  stores  of  the  city,  the  remuneration 
less  satisfactory?  Macy's  does  not  intend  that  either 
of  these  causes  shall  obtain  beneath  its  roof.  So  the 
retiring  employee,  before  she  may  leave  its  pay-roll,  is 
carefully  examined  as  to  her  reasons  for  going.  The 


2IO  The  Romance  of  a  Great  Store 

last  impressions  of  the  store  must  be  quite  as  good  as 
the  earliest  ones — even  upon  the  minds  of  its  workers. 
And  a  careful  system  of  observation  and  of  record  has 
been  upbuilded  to  make  sure  that  this  is  being  obtained; 
which  may  often  lead  to  valuable  opportunities  for  the 
correction  of  store  system,  particularly  in  the  relation- 
ship between  Macy's  and  its  employees. 

We  come  now  face  to  face  with  the  training  depart- 
ment— another  individual  organization  strong  enough 
and  important  enough  to  demand  as  its  head  an  officer 
of  the  rank  and  title  of  assistant  general  manager. 
But  before  we  come  to  consider  it  in  some  of  the  many 
aspects  of  its  workings — before  we  come  to  see 
how  in  these  recent  years  education  has  come  to  be  the 
hand-maiden  of  merchandising,  let  us  consider  the 
actual  experience  of  a  young  woman  who  recently 
entered  the  employment  of  the  store.  She  was  a  col- 
lege woman — a  good  many  of  the  store  people  are  these 
days.  The  mass  of  young  women  who  come  trooping 
out  of  our  colleges  each  June  are  apt  to  find  their 
employment  bents  trending  more  or  less  to  a  common 
course  and  in  great  cycles.  Yesterday  the  cycle  was 
teaching;  the  day  before,  literature  or  the  sciences; 
today  it  is  merchandising.  The  great  department- 
stores  of  our  metropolitan  cities  in  America  are,  as  we 
already  know,  today  paying  their  executives  and  sub- 
executives  salaries  more  than  commensurate  with  the 
earnings  of  those  in  other  lines  of  industry  and  well 
ahead  of  those  in  the  learned  professions.  Moreover, 
they  have  brought  their  hours  of  employment  down  to 


. 


THE  SCIENCE  OF  MODERN  SALESMANSHIP 
Education  places  the  saleswoman  of  today  at  highest  efficiency. 
A  Macy  schoolroom 


I 


The  Macy  Family  2 1 1 

a  point  at  least  approaching  those  of  other  business 
organizations.  Their  appeal  thus  has  become  measur- 
ably greater.  And  they  are  reaping  the  reward — in 
the  attraction  of  a  higher  grade  of  executive  young 
women. 

This  young  woman  was  of  that  type.  And  here  is 
how  she  came  to  Macy's — told  in  her  own  words: 

"Not  at  all  long,  long  ago,  I  went  rather  hesitatingly 
into  the  rooms  labeled  'employment  office'  at  Macy's. 
'Hesitatingly'  because,  if  you  have  ever  gone  around 
very  much  looking  for  a  job,  you  know  that  'Welcome' 
is  not  always  written  on  the  door-mat  that  receives  you. 
But  it  is  at  Macy's — and  a  woman,  who  made  me  feel 
that  she  was  my  friend  by  the  warmth  of  her  smile, 
talked  with  me  and  after  filling  out  the  usual  blanks  I 
was  told  when  to  report  for  work.  They  were  mighty 
decent,  too,  about  trying  to  place  me  selling  the  kind 
of  merchandise  that  7  wanted  to  sell — and  that  means 
a  lot! 

"The  Monday  morning  that  I  came  to  work  was,  of 
course,  rather  hard — it's  not  easy  to  go  into  any  strange 
and  new  place  and  be  crazy  about  it  right  at  first! 
There  were  a  lot  of  us — all  new  girls — and  it  was  fun 
to  see  what  they  did  to  us.  We  went  from  the  em- 
ployment office,  where  there  is  a  good  sign  reading 
'Say  "we"  not  "I"  and  "ours"  not  "my",'  to  our  locker 
room  (which,  by  the  way,  is  the  best  of  any  of  the 
places  I  have  ever  worked  in)  and  then  up  to  the  train- 
ing department  for  a  little  first  timej  after  which  they 
sent  us  to  our  respective  departments.  We  felt  rather 
like  ping-pong  balls,  being  knocked  hither  and  thither, 


212  The  Romance  of  a  Great  Store 

and  though  we  didn't  know  why  we  were  doing  any  of 
these  things  we  trusted  that  those  holding  the  ping- 
pong  bat  did. 

"While  we  were  waiting  up  there  in  the  training 
department,  we  had  a  chance  to  get  to  know  each  other 
a  little — two  or  three  of  us  were  charmingly  Irish — 
and  time  to  note  the  people  busy  about  that  depart- 
ment. Nice  efficient-looking  people  they  were — and 
of  course  we  labeled  and  cubby-holed  them.  One 
man,  we  all  decided,  could  well  be  a  matinee  idol  and 
another  might  have  hailed  from  down  Greenwich 
Village  way. 

"At  last  we  parted  and  went  down  through  the  store 
to  our  own  departments — and  on  the  way  any  im- 
portance which  we  may  have  felt  was  quickly  sub- 
merged in  seeing  what  a  distressingly  small  part  we 
were  of  the  large  Macy  organization.  Even  so,  we 
later  found  out  how  many,  many  other  *weV  like  each 
of  us  could  make  a  deal  of  trouble  for  it,  should  we 
fail  to  carry  on  our  work  correctly.  A  talk  we  had 
from  the  store  manager,  a  little  later  on,  made  me  feel 
directly  responsible  to  the  poor  fellows  who  are  the 
Macy  delivery  men.  If  I  were  not  careful  to  write 
the  address  clearly  in  my  salesbook,  the  delivery  man 
would  get  in  trouble — and  all  because  of  my  hand- 
writing! Funny,  how  we  were  all  linked  up  together. 

"Well,  to  go  back,  I  got  to  my  department  feeling 
decidedly  unimportant,  and  was  put  to  work  behind  a 
counter  which  sold  women's  and  children's  woolen 
gloves  and  women's  kid  gloves.  That  was  the  first 
counter  I  had  ever  sold  from.  In  other  stores  I  have 


The  Macy  Family  213 

sold  from  what  are  known  as  'open  departments';  the 
counter  trade  was  a  revelation  to  me.  Did  you  ever 
notice  the  lack  of  space  behind  the  counters  in  the 
stores?  Well,  with  the  Christmas  rush  and  all  the 
extra  salesgirls,  it  is  lucky  indeed  that  some  of  us  have 
a  sense  of  humor. 

"I  had  not  been  behind  the  counter  for  two  whole 
minutes  before  a  customer  came  along  and  asked  for 
something.  I  tried  to  look  wise  and  answer.  It  was 
all  terribly  new.  The  customers  are  always  so  plenti- 
ful in  Macy's  that  a  new  girl  hardly  has  time  to  have 
the  old  girls  tell  her  about  the  stock.  Moreover,  our 
counter  was  very  near  the  store's  main  entrance — 
which  meant  that  we  were  an  informal  but  very  busy 
little  information  bureau  on  our  own  account — not  only 
about  Macy's  but  apparently  anything  else  in  the  city 
of  New  York. 

"Of  course,  I  didn't  have  a  salesbook  that  day;  I 
didn't  receive  one  until  after  I  had  had  some  training 
and  was  beginning  to  know  something  about  the  Macy 
system.  However,  customers  could  not  see  the  fnew- 
and-green*  written  on  my  face,  so  I  waited  on  them 
thick  and  fastj  even  through  that  first  morning.  And 
a  wild  time  I  had  of  it — gym  was  never  so  exhausting 
as  stooping  down  to  look  for  a  certain  pair  of  gloves 
which  must  be  a  certain  color  combined  with  a  certain 
size,  plus  a  certain  style  and  so  on.  Some  people  must 
stay  up  nights  figuring  along  the  lines  of  permutations 
and  combinations,  so  as  to  work  out  some  unheard  of 
ones  for  the  things  they  ask  for  in  Macy's.  The  other 
girls  were  mighty  nice  to  me,  though,  and  as  helpful 


214  The  Romance  of  a  Great  Store 

as  could  be.  And  our  having  to  almost  walk  upon 
one  another  and  squeezing  past  and  bumping  so  often — 
why,  you  all  get  clubby,  mighty  soon.  At  the  end  of 
that  first  day  I  was  rather  wrecked,  though  happy — 
for  in  my  desire  to  find  things  for  customers  speedily 
I  had,  in  bending  down,  burst  through  the  knee  of  one 
stocking,  broken  a  corset-stay  and  ripped  loose  a  garter! 
Henceforth  I  managed  to  dress  in  a  manner  prepared 
for  doing  gymnastic  stunts,  such  as  deep-knee-bending 
and  leap-frog. 

"My  first  lesson  on  the  store  system  came  on  my  first 
day  in  the  store — and  then  one  every  day  for  an  hour, 
during  the  whole  first  week.  I  liked  that — for  then 
I  knew  how  things  were  supposed  to  be  done.  They 
even  took  us  out  into  departments  that  were  not  busy 
early  in  the  morning  and  had  us  make  out  certain  kinds 
of  sales  right  behind  the  counter,  and  carry  the  whole 
thing  through- — all  that  was  lacking  being  the  real 
customer.  It  gave  us  confidence  and  showed  us  things 
that  we  thought  we  knew,  but  that,  when  it  came  right 
down  to  it,  we  didn't  know  at  all.  The  training 
department  also  gave  us  pamphlets  and  notices  about 
how  to  use  the  telephones  and  telling  us  to  do  certain 
things,  as  well  as  how  our  salary  and  commission  were 
to  be  figured.  Also  one  leaflet  told  us  about  Macy's 
underselling  policy,  and  what  we  should  do  in  case  a 
customer  reported  merchandise  as  being  cheaper  some- 
where else — and,  although  I  had  heard  before  of  this 
policy  of  Macy's,  I  came  to  believe  in  it  faithfully, 
after  I  had  read  the  booklet. 

"When  you're  new  in  a  department  the  'higher  up* 


The  Macy  Family  215 

man  can  do  much  to  make  you  feel  glad  that  you  are 
there.  My  section  manager  and  buyer  were  both  fine. 
The  buyer  told  us  in  a  talk  she  gave  us  all  about  how 
she'd  been  with  Macy's  for  twenty-five  years j  that  she 
had  worked  for  several  years,  when  she  first  began,  at 
six  dollars  a  week.  She  made  us  feel  that  there  surely 
must  be  a  chance  for  every  one  of  us — that  a  firm  that 
is  worth  staying  with  that  long  must  be  pretty  fine 
indeed — and  that  it  was  just  up  to  us  individually, 
whether  or  not  we  would  go  ahead.  As  for  our  section 
manager,  he  was  always  so  nice  in  the  way  he  handled 
any  transaction  with  us — giving  us  an  extended  lunch- 
hour  or  signing  any  sales  checks  that  needed  his  *O.  K.' 
In  many  stores  the  section  managers  are  so  disagreeable 
about  doing  their  work  that  the  salesgirls  hate  to  have 
them  'O.  K.'  things — but  I  have  found  it  quite  the 
opposite  at  Macy's.  And  when  he  had  the  time  and 
saw  any  of  us  looking  glum  or  tired  our  man  would 
talk  to  us  and  succeed  in  cheering  us  up. 

"There  are  many  things,  too,  that  I  discovered 
Macy's  doing  for  its  employees — all  sorts  of  clubs  and 
parties.  One  of  the  most  useful  of  the  first  of  these  I 
found  to  be  the  umbrella  club.  All  I  had  to  do  one 
day  when  it  began  unexpectedly  to  rain  was  to  go  up 
to  the  training  department,  deposit  fifty  cents  and 
receive  an  umbrella.  If  I  left  Macy's  within  the 
month,  I  would  get  my  fifty  cents  back.  Of  course, 
I  was  to  return  the  umbrella  the  very  first  clear  day 
but  any  time  thereafter  that  I  needed  one  I  could  go 
upstairs  and  get  it. 

"Then,  too,  there's  the  recreation  room — you  have 


216  The  Romance  of  a  Great  Store 

two  fifteen-minute  relief  periods  a  day  in  the  store  in 
addition  to  your  lunch  time.  You  can  go  to  the  dress- 
ing rooms  and  wash  up  a  bit  and  then  go  to  the 
recreation  room,  where  there  are  plenty  of  large,  comfy 
chairs,  a  piano,  books  and  the  like.  The  room  is  a 
veritable  social  center  all  the  day  long — I  always  found 
lots  of  friends  there,  no  matter  at  what  time  I  took  my 
relief  periods.  And  you  go  back  to  your  work 
refreshed  and  'full  of  pep*  once  again.  Another  place 
where  you  have  a  chance  to  see  your  friends  is  the 
employees'  lunchroom — and  it  certainly  is  a  popular 
place.  Despite  the  clatter  and  rush,  the  Macy  folks 
have  a  good  time  in  their  cafeteria;  the  crowds  that  eat 
there  every  day  prove  the  wholesomeness  of  its  food. 
It  is  good  home  cooking  and,  as  far  as  its  cheapness  is 
concerned — well,  Pve  eaten  veritable  dinners  there  at 
the  noon  hour,  day  after  day,  and  never  had  my  check 
total  more  than  twenty-five  cents;  with  thirteen  or 
fifteen  nearer  the  average. 

"One  morning  we  all  came  early  to  the  store — to  a 
courtesy  rally.  Thousands  of  us — yes,  literally  thou- 
sands of  us — gathered  on  the  main  floor,  on  the  central 
stair  and  everywhere  roundabout  it,  and  we  sang  songs 
about  smiling;  and  other  optimistic  things.  Then, 
after  good  addresses  by  Mr.  Straus  and  Mr.  Spillman, 
we  all  sang  again  and,  in  response  to  an  inquiry  from 
one  of  the  store  executives,  all  shouted  that  we  would 
try  to  carry  on  with  the  new  Macy  slogan  of  'A  smile 
with  every  package*  and  'a  thank  you  as  goodbye.' ' 

Frank  testimony,  indeed.     And  honest. 


The  Macy  Family  217 

To  bring  this  atmosphere  about  the  worker  in  the 
store  may  no  more  be  the  result  of  hit-and-miss  than 
the  right  sort  of  hiring.  In  the  modern  marts  of  the 
new  Bagdad  the  creation  of  morale,  not  merely  the 
retention  of  a  good  industrial  relationship  between  a 
store  and  its  workers  but  a  constant  bettering  of  it,  has 
come  to  be  as  important  a  problem  as  that  of  the  buying 
or  the  delivering  of  its  merchandise,  or  even  its 
problems  of  making  its  public  constantly  acquainted 
with  its  offerings  and  advantages. 

The  work  of  such  a  department — in  Macy's  the 
department  of  training — divides  itself  quite  logically 
and  clearly  into  two  great  avenues  j  the  one  educational, 
the  other  recreational.  Each  takes  hold  of  the  new- 
comer to  the  store  almost  from  the  very  moment  that 
he  or  she  enters  upon  its  lists  of  employment.  The 
new  salesgirl's  name  is  hardly  upon  the  rolls  of  the 
department  to  which  she  is  assigned  before  a  member 
of  the  store's  reception  committee  is  upon  her  heels  and 
steering  her  straight  through  all  the  maze  of  fresh 
experiences  that  necessarily  must  await  the  novitiate. 
She  is  told  all  about  her  time  disc  of  brass — the  indi- 
vidual coin  that  bears  her  distinctive  number  (built  up 
of  her  department  number  plus  her  own  serial  one) 
which  she  must  drop  into  its  allotted  slot  at  th^ 
employees'  entrance  when  she  comes  to  it  in  the  morn-, 
ing  and  which  she  must  see  is  returned  to  her  before 
the  day  is  done  in  order  that  she  may  have  it  to  use 
again  upon  the  morrow;  how,  going  from  the  locker 
room  to  her  department  at  the  day's  beginning,  she 
must  sign  its  own  time-roll,  which  then  becomes 


21 8  The  Romance  of  a  Great  Store 

accountable  for  her  comings  and  goings  through  the 
rest  of  the  day;  how  she  can  go  and  when  she  must 
return  j  how  she  is  paid — her  salary,  her  quota,  her 
commissions,  her  bonuses. 

All  of  this  might  sound  complicated,  indeed,  to  the 
new  girl,  were  it  not  for  the  kindness  of  her  assigned 
"committeeman."  Complications  in  the  hands  of  a 
woman  who  has  been  through  the  mill,  herself,  and 
who  has  come  to  see  how  they  are  really  not  compli- 
cations at  all,  but  cogs  in  the  grinding  wheels  of  a  great 
and  systematic  machine,  are  easily  explained.  The 
new  girl  catches  on.  The  simple  but  accurate  psycho- 
logical tests  through  which  she  was  put  before  she  was 
accepted  for  Macy's  assure  this.  She  catches  on  and 
within  a  year — perhaps  within  a  space  of  but  a  few 
months — she,  herself,  is  on  the  reception  committee 
and  helping  other  new  girls  through  the  maze  of  first 
employment. 

The  new  girl  catches  on — 

There  lies  before  me,  as  I  write  these  paragraphs,  a 
neatly  typewritten  loose-leaf  memorandum  book.  It 
is  the  work  of  a  girl  who  has  yet  to  round  out  her  first 
year  in  Macy's  and  it  is  a  work  that  all  must  produce 
before  they  may  hope  for  very  definite  advancement. 

This  typewritten  book  is,  in  itself,  a  book  of  the 
Macy  store.  Its  pages  are  a  brief,  succinct  and  thorough 
account  of  the  store's  organization,  its  selling  policies — 
including,  of  course,  the  stressed  under-selling  policy — 
and  its  methods.  Yet  it  is  much  more,  too.  It  is,  if 
you  please,  a  manual  of  salesmanship.  Under  a 
heading,  "Steps  in  an  Ideal  Sale,"  these  are  not  only 


The  Macy  Family  219 

enumerated  but  are  given  relative  values  in  percentages. 
Thus  we  see  that  "attracting  attention"  is  twenty  per 
cent.}  "arousing  interest,"  twenty  $  "creating  desire," 
fifteen;  "closing  sale,"  twenty;  "introducing  new  mer- 
chandise," ten;  and  "securing  good  will,"  fifteen. 
Under  each  of  these  sub-heads,  the  salesclerk  has  col- 
lected a  group  of  points  necessary  to  their  attainment. 
Thus,  under  "attracting  attention"  one  finds  "facial 
expression"  and  under  it,  in  turn,  "pleasant  and 
expectant." 

All  of  these  things  have  been  taught  the  salesgirl 
author  of  this  book — the  volume,  itself,  is  the  result 
of  her  notes  at  her  lecture  classes.  When  she  is  taught 
"attracting  attention"  she  is  told  that  alongside  of 
"facial  expression"  there  comes  "tone  of  voice,"  and 
under  this  last  there  are  five  distinct  classifications: 
"audible,  distinct,  sincere,  rhythmical,  suited  to  cus- 
tomer." Truly  the  science  of  salesmanship  goes  to  far 
lengths  these  days.  From  time  to  time  the  store  has 
engaged  a  professional  teacher  of  elocution  to  take  up 
and  carry  forward  this  last  function  of  its  work.  Here 
is  this  saleswoman  being  taught  that  "swell"  is  a  word 
forever  to  be  avoided  over  the  counter,  "smart," 
"stylish,"  "fashionable,"  "original,"  and  some  others 
being  substituted.  Similarly  "elegant,"  "grand," 
"nifty,"  "classy,"  "cheap,"  "awfully"  and  "ter- 
ribly" are  under  the  ban,  appropriate  synonyms  being 
suggested  to  replace  them.  "Flat"  is  not  to  be  used, 
when  "apartment"  is  meant.  The  entire  list  of  words 
to  be  avoided  in  a  Macy  sales  conversation  runs  to  a 
considerable  length. 


22O  The  Romance  of  a  Great  Store 

This  particular  saleswoman  was  trained  to  textile 
salesmanship.  Consequently,  although  the  first  half 
of  her  book,  which  treats  of  the  store's  methods  and 
policies,  is  common  to  those  that  are  being  prepared  by 
her  fellows  in  all  the  other  selling  departments,  the 
second  half  is  the  result  of  the  special  training  that 
was  given  her  in  the  department  of  training  along  the 
lines  of  her  own  merchandise.  Not  only  did  she  spend 
long  hours  of  the  firm's  time  in  its  classroom  upon  the 
third  floor  of  the  store  and  surrounded  by  cabinets  in 
which  were  displayed  textile  materials  of  every  sort 
and  in  every  stage  of  development,  but  she  was  given 
a  printed  booklet  which  told  her  much  about  her  mer- 
chandise, its  history,  its  production  fields  and  the  details 
of  its  manufacture. 

From  it  she  evolved  her  own  history  of  textiles, 
setting  down  with  accuracy  the  four  fundamental 
cloths — cotton,  linen,  silk  and  wool — and  not  alone 
tracing  their  development  and  manufacture,  but  by 
means  of  carefully  hand-made  diagrams,  pointing  out 
the  difference  between  the  different  textures  and  weav- 
ings.  "Warp"  and  "weft"  and  "twill"  have  come  to 
be  more  than  mere  words  to  her.  They  are  a  part  of 
her  business  capital,  which  she  can — and  does — turn  to 
the  good  account  of  the  store.  So  she  is  to  her  compeer 
of  twenty-five  years  ago — selling  dress-goods  in  the  old 
Macy  store  down  on  Fourteenth  Street — as  the  electric 
light  of  today  is  to  the  old-fashioned  lamps  of  that  day 
and  generation. 

Back  of  this  little  black-bound  notebook  there  is 


The  Macy  Family 

system — organization  if  you  would  read  it  that  way. 
Education,  of  a  truth,  has  become  the  handmaiden  of 
merchandising.  And  the  store's  school  has  become  one 
of  its  ranking  functions. 

As  teachers  in  this  school  there  is  a  specially  trained 
corps  of  men  and  women  who  do  nothing  but  instruct 
and  then  follow  up  their  pupils  to  see  that  they  put 
into  practice  the  things  that  they  have  learned.  The 
educational  work  consists  of  individual  instruction, 
informal  classes  and  practical  demonstrations.  And 
the  result  of  it  all  is  not  merely  to  make  the  employee 
valuable  to  the  house,  but  to  lend  interest  to  mer- 
chandising, itself,  and  to  lift  the  salesperson  out  of  the 
mere  mechanical  process  of  taking  orders  for  goods. 

The  moment  that  a  new  employee  comes  into  the 
Macy  store  his  or  her  instruction  in  its  system,  organi- 
zation and  salesmanship  begins.  We  have  just  seen 
how  one  typical  new  saleswoman  began  receiving  her 
training  from  the  first  day  of  her  employment.  She 
was  no  exception  to  an  inflexible  rule.  The  training 
is  given  invariably.  It  does  not  matter  whether  the 
applicant  has  had  experience  in  other  large  department- 
stores.  Even  a  former  Macy  employee,  accepting 
re-employment,  must  go  through  the  department  of 
training  for,  like  everything  that  grows,  the  store 
system  changes  steadily  from  year  to  year  and  from 
month  to  month. 

A  school  such  as  this  must  have  teachers.  It  is 
futile  to  add  that  they  must  be  specially  trained  and 
thoroughly  competent  in  every  way  to  fulfill  the 


222  The  Romance  of  a  Great  Store 

unusual  task  set  before  them.  And  this,  of  itself,  has 
been  a  problem,  not  alone  with  Macy's,  but  with  the 
other  large  department-stores  of  New  York.  They 
have  co-operated  to  solve  it,  with  the  direct  result  that 
some  two  or  three  years  ago  retail  store  training  became 
a  practical  factor  in  the  city's  educational  system. 
Under  the  enthusiastic  aid  of  Doctor  Lee  Galloway,  its 
head,  the  successful  and  rapidly  expanding  business 
division  of  New  York  University  created  the  school  of 
retail  selling,  bearing  the  name  of  and  affiliated  with 
the  parent  institution.  The  merchants  of  New  York 
raised  a  fund  of  $100,000  for  the  establishment  and 
promotion  of  this  enterprise  and  from  it  last  June  came 
its  first  graduating  class — young  men  and  women 
qualified  to  teach  store  training  in  the  great  bazaars  of 
our  modern  Bagdad. 

The  purposes  of  this  school  are  set  forth  succinctly  in 
its  first  manual,  which  has  come  off  the  press.  Its 
object  is  "to  dignify  retail  selling  through  education  in 
the  following  ways:  To  train  teachers  in  retail  selling 
for  public  high  schools  and  for  retail  stores,  to  train 
employees  of  retail  stores  for  executive  positions  and 
to  do  special  research  work  for  the  department 
managers  of  retail  stores." 

In  accordance  with  the  first  of  these  expressed 
avenues  of  its  endeavors  the  Board  of  Estimate  of  the 
city  of  New  York  already  has  begun  to  move  in  full 
co-operation.  A  high  school  in  the  lower  west  side  of 
Manhattan — the  Haaren  High  School  at  Hubert  and 
Collister  Streets — has  been  designated  as  training  center 
for  this  work.  Girls  are  there  being  taught  retail 


The  Macy  Family  223 

selling.  Nearly  one  hundred  already  are  entered  in 
the  course  and  within  a  few  short  months  the  larger 
stores  of  the  city  will  begin  to  benefit  by  this  highly 
practical  educational  work. 

That  this  experiment  will  prove  successful  seems 
now  to  be  well  beyond  the  shadows  of  doubt.  Yet 
such  success  will  be  in  no  small  measure  due  to  the 
individual  efforts  of  Dr.  Michael  H.  Lucey,  principal 
of  the  Julia  Richman  High  School — in  West  Thir- 
teenth Street,  just  back  of  Macy's  original  store — who 
has  devoted  great  energies  to  its  launching.  Con- 
vinced, from  the  outset,  of  the  real  necessity  of  a  train- 
ing course  in  retail  selling  in  the  city  schools,  Dr.  Lucey 
makes  no  secret  of  his  dubious  fears  at  the  beginning 
of  the  experiment: 

"I  honestly  didn't  see  how  we  were  going  to  do  it," 
he  says,  in  frankly  discussing  the  entire  matter,  "the 
tradition  in  favor  of  an  office  career  rather  than  a  selling 
one  in  a  store  has  so  long  ruled  in  the  high  schools  of 
the  city.  There  are  several  reasons  for  this — the  most 
important  one,  in  my  mind,  the  feeling  in  the  average 
high  school  girPs  head  that  less  education  having  been 
required  in  past  years  for  the  girl  behind  the  counter 
than  for  the  girl  behind  the  typewriter,  she  lost  a  certain 
definite  sort  of  caste,  if  she  followed  the  first  of  these 
callings.  Of  course,  that  is  utter  rubbish.  I  have  no 
hesitancy  today  in  telling  my  girls  that  if  they  are 
looking  for  a  genuine  career  retail  selling  is  the  thing 
for  them.  In  office  work,  if  they  are  very  good,  they 
may  get  up  to  forty  or  even  fifty  dollars  a  week  but 


224  The  Romance  of  a  Great  Store 

there  they  are  pretty  nearly  sure  to  come  to  a 
standstill." 

The  skilled  educator  shakes  his  head  as  he  says  this. 

"You  see  the  difficulty  is  that  so  many  girls  coming 
out  of  schools  such  as  these  look  upon  business  not  as  a 
boy  would  look  at  it,  as  a  career  with  indefinite  and 
permanent  possibilities,  but  rather  as  a  bridge  between 
schooling  and  matrimony — a  bridge  of  but  four,  or  five, 
or  six  years.  And  when  they  are  frank  with  me — and 
they  often  are — and  tell  me  of  this  bridge  that  is  in 
their  minds,  I  am  frank  to  advise  office  work.  It  offers 
better  immediate  returns — yet  in  the  long  run  none  that 
are  even  comparable  with  those  of  a  high-grade 
department-store." 

Following  the  successful  plan  of  the  University  of 
Cincinnati  in  its  technical  engineering  courses,  the 
students  down  at  Haaren  are  grouped  into  working 
pairs,  which  means  that,  in  practice  and  working  in 
alternation,  each  goes  to  school  every  other  week.  In 
the  week  that  one  is  in  the  classroom,  her  partner  is  in 
one  of  the  city  stores  studying  retail  selling  at  first 
hand.  When,  at  the  end  of  six  days,  she  returns  to  her 
schoolroom  she  has  many  questions  derived  from  her 
actual  practice  to  put  to  her  instructor.  So  the  practice 
and  the  principles  of  this  new  hard-headed  science  are 
kept  hand  in  hand  with  its  actual  workings. 

Nor  is  this  all:  some  six  or  seven  hundred  young 
women — and  young  men,  too — are  also  making  a 
special  study  of  retail  selling  in  the  city's  evening 
schools.  A  single  course  at  the  DeWitt  Clinton  High 


The  Macy  Family  225 

School  is  quite  typical  of  these.  Four  evenings  a  week, 
for  two  hours  each  evening,  a  huge  class  is  being 
taught — in  an  even  more  detailed  way  than  is  possible 
under  a  department-store  roof — the  principles  and 
manufacture  of  textiles.  In  these  classes  a  goodly 
number  of  the  Macy  family  are  enrolled.  Another 
goodly  enrollment  goes  into  the  special  lectures  given 
by  a  museum  instructor  at  the  Metropolitan  Museum 
of  Art  on  certain  evenings  and  Sunday  afternoons. 

Truly,  indeed,  education  has  become  the  handmaiden 
of  merchandising. 

As  teachers  in  Macy's  department  of  training  there 
are  enrolled  today  only  those  men  and  women  who 
have  received  a  thorough  normal  school  education  in 
this  great  new  science  of  retailing.  They  do  nothing 
but  instruct  the  store's  workers  and  then  follow  up  to 
make  sure  that  these  are  putting  into  practice  the  prin- 
ciples in  which  they  have  just  been  instructed.  Except 
for  the  training  of  the  future  executives  the  school  time 
is  taken  entirely  from  regular  business  hours  and  so,  at 
the  expense  of  the  house,  itself.  This  schooling — 
under  the  Macy  roof,  please  remember — consists  of 
individual  instruction,  informal  classes  and  practical 
demonstration. 

Specialized  training  under  the  roof  includes  instruc- 
tion under  the  direct  supervision  of  the  Board  of 
Education  in  fundamental  school  subjects  to  those 
classed  as  "juniors"  and  "delinquent  seniors"  j  a  junior 
salesmanship  course  given  to  all  employees  promoted 
from  the  non-selling  divisions  of  the  store  to  its  selling 


226  The  Romance  of  a  Great  Store 

divisionsj  a  senior  salesmanship  class — including  the 
study  of  textiles  and  non-textiles,  and  covering  three 
busy  months  j  the  instruction  of  special  groups  of  sales- 
clerks  to  be  transferred  for  special  sales j  "demonstra- 
tion sales,"  in  which  teacher  and  pupil  "play  store," 
with  the  teacher  impersonating  various  types  of  cus- 
tomers j  the  executive  course  to  prepare  employees  for 
high  executive  positions  of  different  rank  and  order; 
and  the  specialized  instruction  for  dictaphone  and 
comptometer  operators,  correspondence  and  file  clerks 
and  the  like. 

In  the  limited  space  of  this  book,  I  shall  have  no 
opportunity  to  carry  you  further  into  the  details  of  this 
fascinating  department  of  the  modern  store.  The 
saleswoman's  little  black  book  that  we  saw  but  a  few 
minutes  ago  ought  to  show  it  more  clearly  to  your  eyes 
than  any  elaborate  presentments  of  schedules  and  cur- 
riculums.  The  result's  the  thing.  And  Macy's  has 
the  results.  It  has  already  achieved  them.  Not  only 
has  it  lifted  retail  selling  from  the  hard  and  rutty  road 
of  cold  commercialism  but  it  has  lifted  the  individual 
seller,  himself — which,  to  my  way  of  thinking,  is  to  be 
accounted  a  good  deal  of  a  triumph.  In  such  a  triumph 
society  at  large  shares — and  shares  not  a  little. 

It  is  house  policy — sound  policy — to  encourage  em- 
ployees to  look  out  not  only  for  the  store's  interest,  but 
for  their  own.  An  ambitious  salesman  is  indeed  an 
asset  j  and  there  are  ways  of  keeping  him  ambitious. 
There  is,  for  instance,  the  system  of  bonuses  for  punc- 
tuality, which  takes  the  final  form  of  extra  holidays  in 


The  Macy  Family  227 

the  summertime.  A  week's  holiday  with  pay  is  given 
without  fail  to  each  and  every  employee  of  eight 
months'  standing.  But  a  record  of  good  attendance 
and  punctuality  for  fifty  long  weeks  brings  another 
week  of  vacation,  also  with  full  pay.  Department- 
stores  not  so  long  ago  used  to  penalize  their  workers 
for  tardiness.  The  new  Macy  plan  works  best, 
however. 

The  list  of  those  bonus  possibilities  is  long.  There 
is,  of  course,  chief  amongst  them,  the  bonus  which  takes 
the  concrete  form  of  a  sales  commission.  The  sales- 
clerk  is  set  a  moderate  quota  for  his  or  her  week's  work. 
On  sales  that  reach  above  this  figure  he  or  she  is  paid 
a  percentage  commission.  And,  lest  you  may  be 
tempted  to  dismiss  this  statement  with  a  mere  shrug  of 
the  shoulders,  as  a  perfunctory  thing  perhaps,  permit 
me  to  tell  you  that  but  last  year  a  retail  salesman  in  the 
furniture  department  earned  in  excess  of  $6,OOO  in 
wages  and  commissions. 

One  other  thing  before  we  are  done  with  this  main 
chapter  on  the  Macy  family  and  starting  up  another 
which  shall  show  the  super-household  at  its  playj  it  is 
a  thing  closely  associated  both  with  department-store 
employment  and  training:  this  "special  squad"  which 
has  become  so  distinctive  a  feature  of  the  big  red-brick 
selling  enterprise  in  Herald  Square.  Concretely,  it  is 
a  group  of  college  graduates — the  heads  of  the  firm  are 
themselves  college  men  and  have  none  of  the  contempt 
for  education  that  has  become  so  blatant  a  thing  in  the 
minds  of  so  many  "self-made  business  captains"  of 
today — who  desire  to  enter  upon  this  fascinating  and 


228  The  Romance  of  a  Great  Store 

comparatively  new  field  of  department-store  service. 

As  one  of  the  executives  of  the  department  of  train- 
ing himself  says,  "Many  of  these  young  grads  come  in 
here  with  the  rattle  of  their  brand-new  diplomas  so 
loud  in  their  ears  that  for  quite  a  while  they  can't  hear 
anything  else." 

Yet  they  are  good  material — as  a  rule,  uncommonly 
good  material.  So  Dr.  Michael  Lucey  says,  and 
Dr.  Lucey  knows.  As  a  supplement  to  his  educational 
work  in  the  commercial  high  schools  he  entered  Macy's 
last  summer  and  spent  the  two  months  of  his  vacation 
in  the  special  squad,  studying  the  store  from  a  variety 
of  intimate  and  personal  angles.  On  his  first  day  in 
it,  the  distinguished  educator  sold  clothing — men's 
clothing — and  he  sold  to  his  first  customer,  an  accom- 
plishment which  he  notes  with  no  little  pride.  His 
pride  at  the  moment  was  large.  But  the  next  moment 
was  destined  to  take  a  fall.  A  floor  manager  down  the 
aisle  espied  the  new  clerk. 

"Don't  let  those  trousers  sweep  the  floor,"  he 
admonished. 

And  the  educator  had  his  first  taste  of  store  discipline. 

Sooner  or  later  all  these  young  men  out  of  college 
get  that  first  taste.  It  does  not  harm  them.  And  it  is 
not  very  long  before  they  begin  to  observe  that,  after 
all,  there  are  still  a  few  things  about  which  they  know 
practically  nothing.  After  which  their  real  education 
begins. 

A  department-store  is,  among  other  things,  a  great 
melting  pot.  An  Englishman  who  came  into  Macy's 


The  Macy  Family  229 

special  squad  last  year  inquired  just  what  work  might 
be  expected  of  him.  He  was  told. 

"Manual  labor,"  he  protested,  "I  can't  think  of  it. 
I  wear  the  silver  badge." 

Which  meant  that  he  was  one  of  the  King's  own — a 
pensioner  of  the  late  war.  The  store  executive  who 
first  handled  this  bit  of  human  raw  material  possessed 
a  deal  of  real  tactj  most  of  them  do.  He  smiled 
gently  upon  the  Britisher. 

"After  all,"  he  suggested,  "you  know  you  don't  have 
to  tell  your  King  that  you  had  to  use  your  two  good 
hands  in  hard  work." 

The  Englishman  saw  the  point.  He  laughed,  shook 
hands  and  went  to  work.  In  six  months  he  was  an 
executive,  himself.  It's  a  way  that  they  have  at 
Macy's.  And  here  is  part  of  the  way. 

Manual  labor  is  demanded  invariably  of  those  who 
enlist  in  the  special  squad.  It  has  a  regular  system 
through  which  each  of  its  workers  must  pass.  First 
he  is  given  the  history  and  development  of  the  store 
and  of  its  policies.  This  work  is  followed  by  a  week 
on  the  receiving  platform  and  then  a  good  stiff  session 
in  the  marking-room.  The  college  boy  follows  the 
merchandise  along  a  little  further.  He  proceeds  for 
a  while  to  sell  it — then  does  the  work  of  a  section 
manager.  After  which  there  come,  in  logical  sequence, 
the  delivery  department,  the  bureau  of  investigation, 
the  comptroller's  office,  the  tube  system,  an  intensive 
study  of  the  departments  of  employment  and  of  train- 
ing. These  are  not  only  studied  but  written  reports 
are  made  upon  them.  After  which  he  should  have  a 


230  The  Romance  of  a  Great  Store 

pretty  fair  idea  of  the  store  and  the  things  for  which  it 
stands. 

The  course  is  only  varied  in  slight  detail  for  the 
woman  college  graduate.  Macy's  has  naught  but  the 
highest  regard  for  the  gentler  sex — not  alone  as  its 
patrons  but  as  members  of  its  staff — yesterday,  today 
and  tomorrow.  A  woman  may  not  be  able  to  handle 
heavy  cases  upon  the  receiving  platform.  But  there 
are  other  sorts  of  cases  that  she  may  handle — and  fre- 
quently with  a  tact  and  diplomacy  not  often  shown  by 
the  more  oppressed  sex.  I  might  cite  a  hundred 
instances  from  within  the  store  where  she  has  shown 
both — and  initiative  as  well.  But  I  shall  give  only 
one — where  initiative  played  the  largest  part.  Some 
few  months  ago  a  young  woman  who  has  climbed  high 
in  the  store  organization,  to  the  important  post  of  buyer 
of  a  most  important  line  of  muslin  wearing  apparel, 
found  herself  in  France,  but  a  few  hours  before  the 
steamer  upon  which  she  was  booked  to  sail  to  the 
United  States  was  to  depart  from  Southampton.  To 
take  a  steamer  across  the  Channel  and  then  catch  her 
boat  was  quite  out  of  the  question.  She  did  the  next 
best  thing.  She  hopped  on  an  aeroplane  and  flew  from 
Paris  to  London  j  seemingly  in  almost  less  time  than  it 
here  takes  to  tell  it.  She  caught  her  boat.  Her 
instructions  were  to  catch  the  boat.  And  long  since  she 
had  acquired  the  Macy  habit  of  obeying  orders. 

Upon  this,  again,  a  whole  volume  might  be  written — 
upon  the  thoroughness  of  an  organization  which  really 
organizes,  a  training  department  that  really  trains,  a 
system  which  really  systematizes.  And  all  under  the 


The  Macy  Family  231 

title  of  a  family  group — in  which  affection  and  tact  and 
understanding  come  into  play  quite  as  often  as  discipline 
and  energy  and  initiative. 


VII.     The  Family  at  Play 

IN  the  business  machine  of  yesterday  there  were  no 
adjustments  for  play.  It  prided  itself  upon  its 
efficiency.  And  in  the  next  breath  it  proclaimed  that 
such  efficiency  left  no  room  whatsoever  for  such  foolish- 
ness as  recreation.  Today  we  know  much  better.  We 
know  that  play — healthy,  uniform  play  in  a  decent 
amount — is  one  of  the  very  finest  of  tonics  for  the 
human  frame.  And  so  count  it  as  one  of  the  very 
highest  factors  in  our  modern  schemes  of  efficiency. 

Macy's  plays  and  makes  no  secret  of  the  fact.  On 
the  contrary,  it  is  intensely  proud  of  its  provisions  for 
the  welfare  of  its  workers.  Industrial  recreation  is  no 
mere  idle  phrase  to  it.  In  hard  fact  no  small  portion 
of  the  remarkable  esprit  de  corps  of  the  store  is  due  to 
its  well  organized  recreational  and  social  service  work. 
In  a  large  measure  this  part  of  the  operation  of  the 
store  corresponds  to  what  the  War  and  Navy  Depart- 
ments did  through  their  Commissions  on  Training 
Camp  Activities  during  the  great  war.  Bearing  in 
mind  our  likening  Macy's  to  an  army  in  an  earlier 
chapter,  the  parallel  now  becomes  a  close  one  indeed. 
Organized  recreation  promoted  better  team  work  in  the 
warj  it  now  promotes  better  team  work  in  business. 
Ergo,  it  is  for  the  welfare  of  Macy's  that  it  shall  pro- 
mote organized  recreation  beneath  its  own  roof. 

233 


234  The  Romance  of  a  Great  Store 

And  yet  that  very  phrase,  "welfare  work,"  is  not 
often  used  underneath  that  roof.  It  has  the  flavor  of 
patronage  which  is  so  wholly  lacking  in  this  family  of 
thousands,  and  so  it  is  thrust  forever  into  the  discard. 
"The  bunch"  gets  together — you  see,  you  may  call  the 
family  by  almost  any  name  that  pleases  you  best — 
various  groups  are  forever  assembling  at  the  Men's 
Club  or  the  Community  Club  and  making  plans  for 
their  numerous  activities.  And  these  last  cover  a  sur- 
prisingly large  range. 

Any  male  employee  of  the  store  may  join  the  Macy 
Men's  Club.  It  is  a  wholly  self-governing  body  and, 
aside  from  making  up  the  inevitable  deficits  that  accrue, 
the  store  has  no  paternalistic  or  direct  attitude  whatso- 
ever toward  it.  The  club  itself  is  situated  at  1 56  West 
Thirty-fifth  Street,  just  west  of  the  store,  but  entirely 
separated  from  it.  It  occupies  two  floors  of  an  ex- 
tremely comfortable  building.  In  its  externals  it  dif- 
fers very  little  from  any  other  sort  of  men's  club. 
There  are  a  reading  room  and  a  smoking  room  where, 
toward  the  close  of  the  day  and  well  into  the  evening, 
its  members  may  relax.  And  there  is  a  restaurant 
serving  extremely  good  meals. 

It  is  only  as  one  pokes  beneath  the  surface  that  he 
begins  to  find  out  how  very  real  this  small  institution, 
that  is  an  offshoot  of  the  larger  one,  really  is.  Its 
restaurant  serves  meals  at  considerably  less  than  cost. 
And  the  fact  that  this  club  is  regarded  as  something 
more  than  a  mere  combination  of  eating-place  and  rest- 
room  is  shown  by  its  organization  activities  in  other 
directions.  For  example,  its  members  interest  them- 


The  Family  at  Play-  235 

selves  in  general  athletics  to  the  extent  that,  in  the 
proper  seasons,  they  have  very  creditable  teams  of 
baseball,  basketball,  football  and  the  like,  while  occa- 
sional outings  with  suitable  field  events  are  arranged. 
Each  Thursday  evening  there  is  organized  athletic 
work  in  a  large  private  gymnasium  that  is  especially 
hired  for  the  purpose. 

In  fact  it  is  at  this  last  point  that  the  Men's  Club 
comes  in  contact  with  the  Community  Club,  which  is 
the  nucleus  organization  covering  other  recreational 
activities  among  the  women,  the  girls  and  the  younger 
men  of  the  store  family.  For,  by  careful  planning, 
both  of  these  clubs  manage  to  use  the  big  gymnasium 
of  a  single  evening,  while,  after  the  athletic  work  is 
over,  the  floor  is  cleared  and  there  is  dancing  until 
going-home  time. 

These  comforts  are  not  given  without  some  cost  to 
the  Macy  folk.  That  would  be  very  bad  business 
indeed.  It  has  been  so  decided  long  since.  And  so, 
while  it  may  be  human  nature  to  be  ever  on  the  lookout 
for  "something  for  nothing,"  it  is  quite  as  human  to 
derive  very  much  additional  enjoyment  from  the  things 
for  which  one  pays.  Even  the  suggestion  of  charity  is 
not  pleasant.  And  with  this  in  view  these  clubs  charge 
nominal  sums  for  their  privileges.  In  so  doing  they 
earn  the  respect  of  those  who  share  in  them. 

Dues  for  the  Men's  Club  are  placed  at  three  dollars 
a  year — that  surely  is  a  nominal  figure.  These  go 
toward  the  development  of  club  activities  outside  of  its 
actual  running  expenses  (rent,  the  restaurant,  etc.). 
The  gymnasium  fee  is  another  three  dollars,  which  is 


236  The  Romance  of  a  Great  Store 

much  less  than  one  would  pay  for  a  similar  facility 
elsewhere  in  New  York. 

The  scale  of  charges  for  the  Community  Club  is 
quite  different.  The  dues  here  are  but  twenty-five 
cents  a  year — its  membership  is  made  up  mainly  of 
lower-salaried  folk — with  small  extra  charges  for 
special  activities.  For  instance,  the  Spanish  class,  which 
is  taught  by  one  of  the  Spanish  interpreters  in  the  store 
and  which  has  a  constant  attendance  of  about  forty, 
costs  its  pupils  the  very  inconsiderable  sum  of  five  cents 
a  lesson.  The  gymnasium  charge  is  kept  in  a  like  ratio. 
There  are  a  few  others  in  addition.  The  aggregate 
cost,  however,  of  as  many  activities  as  an  average 
employee  can  take  up  is  of  little  moment  or  burden  to 
him  or  to  her — nothing  as  compared  with  the  sense  of 
independence  that  goes  with  the  small  act  of  payment. 

The  Choral  Club,  under  the  direction  of  a  com- 
petent leader,  meets  Wednesday  evenings  in  the  big 
recreation  room  on  the  third  floor  of  the  store,  with  a 
usual  attendance  of  about  two  hundred  men  and  women 
who  are  trained  in  part  singing  and  in  chorus  work  of 
various  sorts.  This  is  not  only  enjoyable  and  popular 
for  its  own  sake  but  it  has  an  added  value  in  leading 
toward  the  organizing  of  the  store's  talent  for  concerts 
and  for  musical  plays. 

And  it  has  such  talent.  Do  not  forget  that — not 
even  for  a  passing  moment.  It  would  be  odd,  indeed, 
if  a  family  of  five  thousand  folk  did  not  develop  upon 
demand  much  real  histrionic  and  artistic  ability  of  every 
sort.  And  when  such  potentialities  are  fostered  and 
encouraged,  the  results — well,  they  are  such  as  to  warn 


The  Family  at  Play  237 

Florenz  Ziegfeld  and  the  rest  of  the  Forty-second 
Street  theatrical  producers  to  keep  a  sharp  eye,  indeed, 
upon  Macy's. 

On  Monday  evenings,  the  entire  winter  long  and  well 
into  the  spring,  the  Dramatic  Club  meets  and  here  every 
budding  Maxine  Elliott  or  Ina  Claire  has  her  full 
opportunity.  On  Tuesday  there  is  a  get-together 
evening — one  begins  to  think  with  all  these  evenings 
so  neatly  filled  of  the  calendar  of  a  real  social  enter- 
prise— and  then  one  sees  the  store  family  at  its  fullest 
relaxation.  Here  was  a  recent  Tuesday  night.  It 
was  just  before  Christmas  and  the  store  was  approach- 
ing the  annual  peak  load  of  its  year's  traffic.  Yet  it 
had  no  intention  whatsoever  of  relaxing  a  single  one 
of  its  social  endeavors. 

On  this  particular  Tuesday  evening  our  salesgirl — 
the  one  whom  we  saw  but  a  moment  ago  being  inducted 
into  the  selling  organism  of  the  store — made  her  first 
personal  acquaintance  with  the  Community  Club.  Let 
her  tell  her  own  story,  and  in  her  own  way: 

"Up  in  the  recreation  room  a  few  hundred  of  us 
gathered  for  a  regular  party.  Some  few  of  us  had 
gone  home  after  store  hours  for  our  dinner;  the  others 
had  had  it  right  in  the  store's  own  lunchroom.  It 
surely  is  great  the  way  that  you  can  get  a  meal  there  in 
Macy's  at  any  time  you  are  staying  late — either  on  duty 
or  on  pleasure. 

"At  about  six-thirty  the  evening's  program  got  under 
way — so  that  the  many  friendly,  chattering  groups  of 
girls  in  the  big  room  finally  had  to  simmer  down  to 
something  approaching  silence.  Then  the  Choral  Club 


238  The  Romance  of  a  Great  Store 

began  singing  for  us — some  good,  old-time  Christmas 
carols  first,  and  then  some  other  songs.  All  of  us 
joined  finally  in  the  chorus,  leaving  the  club  to  carry 
the  difficult  parts.  They  could  do  that  all  right,  too. 
Mr.  Janpolski,  their  leader,  finally  gave  us  a  solo  and 
after  that  there  was  a  grand  march  led  by  our  own 
beloved  Mar j one  Sidney.  Everybody  joined  in — not 
only  in  body,  but  in  spirit.  It  was  like  Washington's 
Birthday  in  the  big  gym  up  at  Northampton.  Messen- 
ger girls,  college  graduates,  salesfolk,  deliverymen, 
managers — everyone  was  just  the  same  in  that  blessed 
hour.  Distinctions  of  the  store  were  gone.  We  were 
boys  and  girls — some  of  us  a  bit  grown  up  and  grayed 
to  be  sure,  but  all  with  Peter  Pannish  hearts — having  a 
real  party  once  again. 

"The  grand  march  ended  in  dancing  for  every  one — 
with  a  jolly  negro  at  the  piano  doing  his  level  best  to 
uphold  the  reputation  of  his  race  for  really  spontaneous 
music.  Finally,  after  many  encore  dances,  everybody 
withdrew  from  the  floor  and  out  came  Mr.  Salek,  the 
director  of  the  Men's  Club,  and  Miss  Knowles,  doing 
an  almost  professional  dance.  The  Castles  had  very 
little  on  this  couple — the  way  Salek  lifted  his  partner 
and  then  let  her  down — slowly,  slowly,  still  more 
slowly — reminded  me  of  Maurice  and  Walton.  Their 
performance  brought  down  the  house.  Of  course  they 
had  to  respond  to  encores  j  again  and  again  and  again. 

"Following  this — for  Macy's  believes  that  variety  is 
the  spice  of  all  life — a  Junior  recited  the  unforgetable 
'  Twas  the  night  before  Christmas  and  all  through  the 
house.'  She  really  was  a  darling.  And  how  Christ- 


The  Family  at  Play  239 

massy  she  looked,  with  her  big  butterfly  sash  and  her 
hairbow  of  scarlet  tulle  .  .  .  Next  on  the  program 
came  dancing — for  everybody.  First,  however,  there 
was  another  march,  so  that  each  couple  received  a 
number — while  every  little  while  certain  numbers  (the 
couples  that  held  them)  were  eliminated  from  the 
floor.  The  nicest  part  about  this  elimination  dance,  as 
they  called  it,  was  that  instead  of  only  the  last  couple 
getting  the  prize,  as  is  generally  done — every  couple, 
as  soon  as  its  number  was  called  and  it  left  the  floor, 
went  over  to  a  big  chimney-top,  with  a  proverbially 
jolly  'Santa'  peering  out  of  it.  There  Santa  gave  to 
each  one  a  little  gift,  such  as  a  whistle,  a  stick  of  candy, 
or  a  jolly  little  rattle.  Then,  after  more  dancing, 
refreshments  were  served  by  gaily  garbed  Junior 
waitresses.  After  which  the  dancing  continued  until 
the  merry  Community  Club  Christmas  dance  was 
entirely  over." 

Already  I  have  touched  upon  the  annual  vacation  of 
the  Macy  worker — one  week  with  pay  after  eight 
months  continuous  employment,  two  weeks  after  two 
years,  three  weeks  after  five  years,  and  a  month  after 
twenty-five  years  of  service.  A  charming  retreat 
among  the  hills  of  Sullivan  County,  eighty-seven  miles 
from  New  York  and,  through  the  foresight  of  the 
management  of  the  store,  purchased  long  ago,  provides 
an  ideal  vacation  spot  for  the  Macy  girls  who  wish  to 
spend  their  holidays  among  truly  rural  surroundings. 
For  this  purpose  a  large  farm  house  and  a  hundred 
acres  of  surrounding  land  were  acquired  by  Macy's  and 


240  The  Romance  of  a  Great  Store 

more  than  fifty  thousand  dollars  spent  in  enlarging  the 
house,  beautifying  the  grounds  and  otherwise  making 
them  suitable  for  their  summertime  uses.  In  addition 
to  the  big  and  immaculately  white  farm  house  there  are 
three  cottages  upon  the  property.  As  many  as  sixty- 
five  girls  can  be  accommodated  at  a  single  time  upon  it. 
Three  jumps  or  so  from  the  main  house  and 
stretched  out  in  front  of  it  is  a  lakej  a  regular  lake,  if 
you  please,  big  enough  for  boating  and  for  bathing, 
although  not  so  large  that  one  of  the  keen-eyed 
chaperones  may  keep  her  weather  eye  on  those  of  her 
charges  whose  tastes  run  toward  water  sports.  In  this 
Adamless  Eden  bloomers  and  middy  blouses  are  de 
ngueury  and  as  the  few  restraints  imposed  are  only 
those  inspired  by  ordinary  good  sense,  the  girls  experi- 
ence the  real  joys  of  living. 

All  of  these  activities  and  interests — and  many,  many 
more  besides — are  faithfully  chronicled  in  the  Macy 
house  organ,  Sparks.  Here  is  a  monthly  magazine — 
of  some  sixteen  pages,  each  measuring  seven  by  ten 
inches — that  in  appearance  alone  would  grace  any 
newsstand,  while  its  contents  almost  invariably  bear  out 
the  attractiveness  of  its  cover  designs.  Practically  the 
entire  publication  is  prepared  by  its  staff,  which,  in 
turn,  is  composed  of  members  of  the  Macy  family. 

House  organs,  such  as  this,  are,  of  course,  no  novelty 
in  the  American  business  world  of  today.  There 
probably  are  not  less  than  fifty  department-stores  alone 
which  are  now  printing  brisk  contemporaries  of  Sparks. 
The  internal  publications  of  a  house,  such  as  Macy's, 


The  Family  at  Play  241 

have  long  since  come  to  be  recognized  as  one  of  its  most 
valuable  media  for  the  promotion  of  morale.  It  costs 
money,  but  it  is  money  well  expended.  So  says  modern 
business.  And  modern  business  ought  to  know.  For 
it  has  tested  the  results.  And  the  house  organ  long 
since  became  one  of  the  really  valuable  aides. 

Here,  then,  in  Sparks  is  not  only  a  medium  in  which 
the  Macy  folks  may  come  the  better  to  know  about  one 
another,  a  bulletin  board  upon  which  the  heads  of  the 
house  may  from  time  to  time  carry  very  direct  and 
sincere  messages  to  their  big  family,  but  a  mouthpiece 
in  which  the  embryo  literary  genius  may  become 
articulate.  And,  lest  you  be  tempted  to  believe  that  I 
have  permitted  simile  to  carry  me  quite  away  from  fact, 
let  me  show  you  a  single  instance — there  are  a  number 
of  others  beside — in  which  a  real  literary  genius  has 
come  to  bloom  underneath  the  great  roof  that  looks 
down  upon  Herald  Square: 

His  pen  name  is  Francis  Carlin — but  his  real  name, 
the  one  under  which  he  entered  Macy's,  is  James 
Francis  Carlin  MacDonnell.  Of  him  Current  Opinion 
but  a  year  or  two  ago  said:  "The  writer  (Carlin) 
.  .  .  was  until  a  few  weeks  ago  a  floorwalker  in  one  of 
the  big  department-stores  of  New  York  City  (Macy's) 
and  was  discovered  by  Padraic  Colum.  He  had  his 
book  obscurely  printed  and  it  has  been  unobtainable  at 
bookstores  until  recently.  ...  It  has  the  true  Celtic 
quality.  The  dedication  alone  is  worth  the  price  of 
admission:  'It  is  here  that  the  book  begins  and  it  is  here 
that  a  prayer  is  asked  for  the  soul  of  the  scribe  who 
wrote  it  for  the  glory  of  God,  the  honor  of  Erin  and 


242  The  Romance  of  a  Great  Store 

the  pleasure  of  the  woman  who  came  from  both — his 
mother.' " 

Mr.  MacDonnell  has  written  two  books:  this  first, 
My  Ireland,  and  more  recently  the  Cairn  of  Stones. 
That  he  has  great  talent  is  again  attested  by  The  Boston 
Transcript  which  said  recently:  "Mr.  Carlin's  Celtic 
poems,  ballads  and  lyrics  are  nearer  the  fine  perfection 
of  the  native  poets  belonging  to  the  Celtic  renaissance 
than  those  produced  by  any  poet  of  Irish  blood  born 
in  America." 

After  which,  who  may  now  dare  say  that  genius  may 
not  blossom  in  a  department-store?  And  even  were  it 
not  for  the  gaining  glory  of  Carlin,  the  pages  of  any 
current  issue  of  Sparks  would  show  that  there  is 
more  than  a  deal  of  artistic  merit  in  the  widespread 
ranks  of  the  Macy  family.  The  desire  for  self- 
expression  is  never  stunted.  And  the  pages  of  its 
avenue  of  expression  are  read  by  none  more  closely 
than  the  members  of  the  family  who  hold  the  owner- 
ship of  Macy's. 

And  yet  these  men — the  heads  of  the  great  mer- 
chandising house — are  not  only  accessible  to  their  busi- 
ness family  through  the  printed  word.  They  are  not 
standoffish.  On  the  contrary,  they  are  most  widely 
known  throughout  the  store j  most  reachable,  both 
within  their  offices  and  without.  Take  the  single 
matter  of  grievances,  for  a  most  important  instance: 
A  Macy  worker  may  feel  that  justice  on  some  point  or 
other  is  being  denied  him  by  a  superior.  In  such  a  case 
he  has  immediate  recourse  to  any  one  of  three  ex- 


lii'i  •  • ' 
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The  Family  at  Play  243 

pedients:  he  may  take  his  case  to  the  department  of 
training,  to  the  general  manager  of  the  store,  or  to  one 
of  the  officers  of  the  corporation.  As  a  rule,  however, 
the  difficulty  can  be  straightened  out  in  the  first  of  these 
avenues  of  appeal,  which  is  an  automatic  clearing-house 
for  all  matters  of  personnel.  The  heads  of  this  depart- 
ment have  been  chosen  as  much  as  anything  for  the 
sympathy  which  enables  them  to  review  any  employee's 
case  intelligently  and  fairly  and  for  the  influence  that 
makes  it  possible  for  them  to  see  at  all  times  that  full 
justice  is  being  done.  While  the  fact  that  the  worker, 
himself,  may  take  the  matter  to  the  general  manager  or 
even  to  one  of  the  three  members  of  the  firm,  is  a 
practical  guarantee  against  persecution  of  any  sort. 

Just  off  the  corner  of  the  recreation  room  on  the 
third  floor  is  the  private  office  of  the  assistant  superin- 
tendent of  training.  Her  title  sounds  rather  formid- 
able and  does  justice  neither  to  her  job  nor  to  her 
personality:  for  in  reality  she  combines  the  qualities  of 
a  charming  hostess,  an  efficient  manager  and  a  mother 
confessor. 

In  the  Macy  book  of  information  for  employees 
there  is  a  paragraph  under  the  heading,  "Department 
of  Training,"  which  says:  "It  is  the  purpose  of  this 
department  to  interest  itself  in  all  the  employees  of 
this  organization.  Do  not  hesitate  to  go  with  your 
troubles  to  the  assistant  superintendent  of  training, 
whose  duty  it  is  to  interest  herself  in  you:  both  in  the 
store  and  at  your  home.  She  will  be  glad  to  give  you 
advice,  both  in  business  and  in  personal  matters." 

And  so  she  has  her  hands  full,  and  sometimes  her 


244  The  Romance  of  a  Great  Store 

heart  as  well}  for,  among  five  thousand  folk  of  every 
sort  and  kind,  there  are  bound  to  be  many  perplexing 
personal  problems  and  troubles,  to  which  the  very  best 
kind  of  help  is  the  kindly  and  disinterested  advice  of  a 
sympathetic  and  understanding  person.  And  when  that 
person  is  a  woman — a  woman  of  rare  tact — the  problem 
is  generally  apt  to  approach  its  solution.  Which  makes 
for  friendship,  not  merely  between  the  worker  and  that 
woman,  but  between  the  worker  and  the  store.  And 
so  still  another  rivet  is  clinched  in  the  great  morale 
bridge  between  the  business  machine  and  the  human 
units  that  enable  it  to  function  so  very  well  indeed. 
And  the  Macy  spirit  becomes  an  even  more  tangible 
thing. 

As  one  goes  through  the  store  he  finds  many  evi- 
dences of  the  things  that  go  to  upbuild  that  spirit.  It 
may  be  only  a  printed  sign  cautioning  courtesy  and 
cheerfulness,  not  merely  between  the  store  workers  and 
its  patrons,  but  between  the  members  of  the  Macy 
family,  themselves.  "A  smile  with  every  package  and 
a  'thank  you'  as  good-bye,"  rings  one.  And  remember 
that  other,  again  more  cautious:  "In  speaking  say  'we' 
and  'our,'  not  '!'  and  'mine.' '  It  may  be  the  warm 
hand  of  friendship  from  the  member  of  the  reception 
committee  to  the  new  girl  that  comes  to  work  under 
the  Herald  Square  roof,  or  it  may  be  any  of  the  long- 
planned,  coolly  devised  methods  of  social  justice  to  the 
store  employee.  These  last  are  never  to  be  overlooked. 

For  instance,  three  months  after  the  day  that  a  new 
employee  first  arrives  to  work  at  Macy's,  membership 


The  Family  at  Play  245 

in  the  Macy  Mutual  Aid  Association  becomes  automatic. 
In  no  small  way  it  becomes  a  real  part  of  his  job. 
It  is  the  object  of  the  M.  M.  A.  A.  to  provide  and 
maintain  a  fund  for  the  assistance  of  its  members  dur- 
ing sickness  and  of  their  families  or  dependents  in  case 
of  death.  Dues  in  this  association  are  graded  accord- 
ing to  the  worker's  salary,  consist  of  one  per  cent,  of 
the  salary  up  to  thirty  dollars  j  while  the  sick  benefits 
are  two-thirds  of  the  salary,  limited  by  a  benefit  of 
twenty  dollars.  The  death  benefits  are  five  times  the 
weekly  salary,  with  a  minimum  of  sixty  dollars  and  a 
maximum  of  one  hundred  and  fifty  dollars. 

It  is  obvious  that  these  dues  do  not  of  themselves 
pay  the  benefits.  The  house  "chips  in."  Yet  not 
through  sympathy,  but  through  one  of  the  tenets  of 
good  business  as  we  moderns  have  now  begun  to 
know  it. 

"It  would  be  poor  business  for  me,  indeed,"  said  a 
silk  manufacturer  of  Connecticut  to  me  not  long  ago, 
"to  let  my  people  become  sick.  I  want  no  germ 
diseases  in  my  mills.  Neither  do  I  want  the  mills  to 
cease  their  continuous  operation.  That,  too,  is  poor 
business.  And  so  the  sickness  that  may  cost  my  worker 
ten  dollars  may  easily  cost  me  twenty-five — in  the  stop- 
page of  my  plant,  alone." 

The  control  of  the  Macy  Mutual  Aid  Association  is, 
moreover,  vested  solely  in  the  hands  of  the  store 
employees.  An  itemized  statement  of  its  receipts  and 
its  disbursements  as  well  as  its  proceedings  is  posted  each 
month  on  the  store  bulletin  boards  and  printed  in 
Sparks,  so  that  every  member  of  the  organization  may 


246  The  Romance  of  a  Great  Store 

know  its  exact  affairs.      It  decidedly  does  not  work  in 
the  dark. 

I  should  be  derelict,  indeed,  in  regard  to  this  whole 
question  of  health  in  modern  industry — and  of  the 
particular  modern  industry  of  which  this  book  treats — 
if  I  neglected  in  these  pages  that  corner  of  the  high-set 
eighth  floor — flooded  by  sunshine  during  the  greater 
part  of  each  pleasant  day — where  sits  the  Macy  hos- 
pital, conducted  by  the  Macy  Mutual  Aid  Association. 
It  is,  of  course,  solely  an  emergency  hospital,  yet  one 
where  doctors,  nurses,  dentists  and  a  chiropodist  are 
constantly  on  duty.  Three  doctors — two  men  and  one 
woman — consult  with  and  prescribe  for  the  patients,  two 
dentists  look  after  their  teeth,  and  a  chiropodist  takes 
care  of  that  prime  asset  to  all  salespeople — the  feet. 
Those  members  of  the  hospital  staff  are  professional 
men  and  women  of  the  first  rank  and  they  work  with 
the  best  and  latest  equipment.  Although  the 
emergency  hospital  is  primarily  for  the  services  of  the 
store  workers  it  stands  also  at  the  service  of  any  one 
who  may  come  into  the  building  and  need  its  services. 
For  instance,  in  case  a  customer  becomes  ill,  a  wheel- 
chair is  sent,  and  he  or  she,  as  the  case  may  be,  is  taken 
to  the  hospital  for  immediate  restorative  treatment. 

One  or  two  final  phases  of  this  family  life  upon  a 
huge  scale  in  the  very  heart  of  New  York  and  I  am 
done  with  it.  Thrift,  in  the  Macy  category  of  the 
making  of  a  good  worker,  comes  only  next  to  good 
health.  Under  that  same  widespread  roof  there  is  a 


The  Family  at  Play  247 

savings  bank  for  the  sole  use  of  Macy  folk.  Any 
amount  from  five  cents  upward  is  accepted  as  a  deposit 
and  the  fact  that  good  use  is  made  of  this  constant 
incentive  to  thrift  is  evidenced  by  the  continued  and 
prosperous  operation  of  the  institution.  It  has  not 
been  necessary  to  organize  it  as  a  full-fledged  savings 
bank.  At  the  end  of  each  day  it  transfers  its  funds,  by 
means  of  a  special  messenger,  to  one  of  the  largest  of 
New  York  savings  banks  which  handles  the  accounts 
directly.  The  law  does  not  permit  a  savings  bank  in 
the  State  of  New  York  to  open  branches — else  that 
would  have  been  done  at  Macy's  long  ago.  The 
messenger  method  was  the  only  feasible  substitute. 

Believing  that  even  the  most  provident  may  occa- 
sionally have  good  reasons,  indeed,  for  wishing  to 
borrow  money,  the  heads  of  the  house  have  set  aside  a 
permanent  fund  as  a  loan  reserve  for  the  Macy  folk. 
Any  one  who  has  been  in  the  store's  employ  for  at  least 
three  months  may,  upon  advancing  even  ordinarily 
satisfactory  reasons,  borrow  from  this  fund.  The  limit 
is  a  sum  which  can  be  repaid  in  ten  weekly  installments. 
No  security  is  required  nor  is  any  interest  charged. 
The  employee  is  bound  by  nothing  but  his  honor. 

That  sixty-four  years  of  continuous  operation  have 
established  the  commercial  success  of  Macy's  should  be 
patent  to  you  by  this  time.  But  now  that  you  have 
known  of  the  present-day  family  that  dwells  beneath 
its  roof,  you  may  ask:  Has  this  policy  toward  its 
personnel  worked  out  in  hard  practice?  The  question 
is  indeed  a  fair  one.  To  carry  it  still  further,  is  this 


248  The  Romance  of  a  Great  Store 

machine  of  modern  business  humanized  and  inspired  in 
fact  as  well  as  in  theory?  One  cannot  help  but  think 
of  the  machine.  Machines  are  hard.  Generally  they 
are  fabricated  in  that  hardest  of  all  metals — steel.  Can 
steel  be  warmed  and  tempered?  Can  the  fact  be 
recognized  that  the  units  of  the  Macy  store  are  human 
and  warmj  and  not  steel  and  cold? 

I  think  so.  I  imagine  that  you  would  have  the 
answer  to  all  these  questions  if  you  could  talk  for  a 
little  time  with  Jimmie  Woods,  whom  we  saw,  but  a 
short  time  hence,  as  a  push-cart  horse  for  the  early 
Macy's  and  who  has  come  today  to  be  the  assistant 
superintendent  of  the  store's  delivery  department.  His 
new  job  requires  much  more  push  than  that  old-time 
one.  As  a  caption-line  in  a  recent  issue  of  Sparks  aptly 
said:  "Jimmie  Woods  delivers  the  goods."  Meta- 
phorically speaking,  the  house  of  Macy  does  the  same 
thing.  And  at  no  point  more  than  in  its  treatment  of 
its  human  factors. 

The  day  was  not  so  very  long  ago  when  the  life  of 
a  salesperson,  even  in  a  New  York  store  of  the  better 
class,  was  not  a  particularly  enviable  thing.  We  saw, 
when  we  discussed  the  earlier  Macy's,  the  long  hours 
and  the  low  wages  of  the  rank  and  file  of  the  organi- 
zation. These  things  have  changed  today — in  all 
department-stores  that  are  worthy  of  the  name.  Public 
opinion  was  partly  responsible  for  the  change.  But 
I  think  quite  as  large  a  factor  was  the  realization  that 
gradually  was  forced  upon  the  minds  of  the  merchants 
themselves  that  the  old  methods  were  poor  business 
methods.  Macy's  knows  that  today.  We  have  seen 


The  Family  at  Play  249 

the  man  who  came  to  New  York  fifteen  years  ago  with 
eleven  dollars  and  a  suitcase  come  to  a  high-salaried 
position  with  the  house  today  j  the  retail  furniture 
salesman  earning  over  six  thousand  dollars  a  year,  the 
twenty-five  buyers  at  ten  thousand  a  year  and  upward, 
as  well  as  those  at  twenty-five  thousand  a  year  and 
upward.  And  we  know  that  every  one  of  these  men 
and  women  have  been  the  product  of  the  Macy  organi- 
zation— from  the  moment  that  they  began  at  the  very 
bottom  of  the  ladder. 

And,  lest  you  still  think  I  befog  the  question,  permit 
me  to  add  that  the  minimum  weekly  wage  of  the  woman 
employee  in  Macy's  today  is  $14.005  and  the  average 
pay — apart  from  that  of  the  executives  and  sub- 
executives — the  men  and  women  who,  in  the  store's  own 
nomenclature,  are  classed  as  "specials"  and  exempted 
from  the  time-disc  record  of  their  comings  and  their 
goings — is  $25.00. 

Have  I  now  answered  your  question  fairly?  If  still 
you  wobble  and  are  uncertain,  permit  me  to  call  your 
attention  to  the  service  records  of  the  store.  They 
speak  more  eloquently  than  aught  else  can  of  the 
loyalty  and  the  interest  of  its  workers.  Qualities  such 
as  these  are  not  generated  under  bad  working  practices 
of  any  sort. 

The  records  tell — and  tell  accurately,  as  well  as 
eloquently.  A  Macy  man  was  recently  retired  on  a 
pension — the  store's  list  of  pensioners  runs  to  a  con- 
siderable length — after  a  round  half-century  of  service. 
Others  will  soon  follow  in  his  footsteps.  There  are 
today  upon  the  rolls  ninety-two  men  and  women  who 


250  The  Romance  of  a  Great  Store 

have  been  with  it  for  more  than  twenty-five  years.  In 
the  delivery  department  alone  there  are  twenty-three 
men  who  have  records  of  twenty  years  or  more  j  and  of 
these  there  are  three  who  have  been  there  more  than 
forty  years.  Three  hundred  members  of  the  Macy 
family  have  records  of  fifteen  years  or  over,  fifteen 
hundred  have  been  with  it  upwards  of  five  years  and — 
despite  the  recent  after-the-war  difficulties  of  maintain- 
ing labor  morale  and  organization — only  about  one- 
quarter  of  the  force  have  come  within  the  twelvemonth. 
The  labor  turnover  in  Macy's  is  low  indeed — and  con- 
stantly is  growing  lower. 

These  figures,  it  seems  to  me,  are  the  surest  indication 
that  the  store's  workers  are  treated  fairly.  Moreover, 
they  alone  show  clearly  the  workings  of  its  announced 
policy  to  give  its  own  people  every  possible  opportunity 
to  grow  within  its  ranks.  In  fact,  no  man  or  woman 
can  stand  still  long  at  Macy's  and  continue  to  hold  his 
or  her  job.  Progress  is  a  very  necessary  requisite 
there.  And  in  order  that  progress  may  be  recognized, 
steadily  and  fairly,  system  comes  in  once  again  to 
stabilize  a  very  natural  phase  of  human  development. 
As  the  Macy  employee  shows  new  capabilities  or  addi- 
tional industry,  recommendations  for  increases  in  his 
remuneration  are  made  by  his  department  manager  to 
a  salary  committee,  appointed  for  this  sole  purpose. 
Periodically  this  committee  receives  a  list  of  all  the 
store  folk  who  have  not  received  an  increase  for  a 
period  of  six  months.  The  list  is  carefully  reviewed 
and,  whenever  and  wherever  it  can  be  justified,  the  pay 
envelope  of  the  employee  is  fattened. 


The  Family  at  Play  25 1 

Macy's  is,  after  all,  a  very  human  institution.  The 
machine  may  be  steel-like,  but  it  is  not  steel.  It  is 
flesh  and  blood  and  human  understanding.  I  some- 
times think  of  it  as  a  country  town,  rather  than  as  a 
family — one  of  those  nice,  old-fashioned  sorts  of 
country  towns,  where  most  of  the  residents  know  one 
another,  where  there  is  an  efficient  governing  body  and 
where  the  community  spirit  is  one  of  the  strongest 
factors  in  its  progress.  Being  human  it  is  fallible, 
being  fallible  it  still  has  something  for  which  to  workj 
and  in  fulfilling  this  obligation  of  work  it  is  carrying 
out  its  destiny. 


Tomorrow 


I.     In  Which  Macy's  Prepares  to 
Build  Anew 

VTESTERDAY,  when  Milady  of  Manhattan  went 
A  for  her  shopping  along  the  tree-lined  reaches  of 
Fourteenth  Street,  and  found  her  way  into  that 
perennially  fascinating  shop  at  the  corner  of  Sixth 
Avenue  which  specialized  in  its  ribbons  and  its  gloves 
and  its  rare  exotic  imported  perfumes,  she  dreamed  but 
little,  if  indeed  she  dreamed  at  all,  of  a  Macy's  that 
some  day  should  stand  intrenched  at  Herald  Square 
and  embrace  a  whole  block-front  of  Broadway.  Today 
Milady,  finding  her  way  into  that  small  triangular 
"Square"  in  the  very  heart  of  Manhattan — still  on  the 
sharp  lookout  for  ribbons  and  gloves  and  rare  exotic 
perfumes — and  Heaven  only  knows  what  else  beside — 
may  little  dream  of  the  changes  that  a  tomorrow — 

Tomorrow — what  business  has  a  book  such  as  this  to 
be  talking  of  tomorrow  j  a  vague,  fantastic  thing  that 
only  fools  may  seek  to  interpret  in  advance? 

We  have  seen  between  these  covers  quite  a  number 
of  things — some  of  them  passing  odd  things — yet 
classified  among  the  factors  of  good  business,  according 
to  all  of  its  modern  definitions.  And  to  them  we  shall 
now  add  another — the  understanding  and  the  correct 
interpretation  of  tomorrow.  I  think  that  when  I 
depicted  Mr.  Macy  standing  with  his  daughter, 

255 


256  The  Romance  of  a  Great  Store 

Florence,  at  the  corner  of  Thirty-fourth  Street  and 
Broadway  half  a  century  ago  and  explaining  how  there 
would  be  the  business  center  of  New  York  fifty  years 
hence,  I  called  attention  to  the  sharp  commercial  fact 
that  a  great  machine  of  modern  business  goes  ahead 
quite  as  much  upon  the  vision  and  the  foresight  of  the 
men  that  guide  it  as  upon  their  prudence.  Which 
means  in  still  another  way,  the  proper  understanding 
of  tomorrows.  And  that  understanding  today  is  quite 
as  much  an  asset  of  Macy's  as  its  real  estate,  its  cash 
balances  in  the  banks,  or  the  millions  of  dollars  stand- 
ing in  the  stock  upon  its  shelves. 

More  than  a  decade  ago  the  big  store  in  Herald 
Square  first  began  to  feel  its  own  growing  pains.  The 
fact  that  ten  years  before  that  it  had  been  planned  as  the 
largest  single  department-store  building  in  the  United 
States,  if  not  in  the  entire  world,  availed  nothing  when 
business  came  in  even  greater  measure  than  the  most 
far-sighted  of  its  planners  had  dared  to  dream. 
Within  three  or  four  years  after  the  time  that  the 
caravans  of  trucks  and  drays  had  moved  Macy's  the 
mile  uptown  from  the  old  store  to  the  new,  changes 
were  under  way  in  the  new  building,  changes  seeking 
to  make  an  economy  of  space  here,  another  economy 
there — everywhere  that  an  odd  corner  could  be  utilized 
to  the  better  advantage  of  the  store  and  its  patrons,  it 
was  at  once  so  used.  Finally  it  became  necessary  to 
abandon  the  exhibition  hall  that  was  originally  located 
on  the  ninth  floor  and  thrust  that  great  space  into  one 
of  the  larger  non-selling  departments  of  the  enter- 


In  Which  Macy's  Prepares  to  Build  Anew     257 

prise  j  and  two  or  three  years  later  an  entire  extra  floor 
was  added  atop  of  the  big  building — adding  a  goodly 
ten  per  cent,  to  its  million  square  feet  of  floor  space 
already  existing. 

Yet  even  these  changes  could  not  solve  the  final 
problem.  Macy's  still  refused  to  stay  put.  Its  growth 
was  relentless,  unending.  Each  fresh  provision  made 
for  its  expansion  was  quickly  swallowed  up,  with  the 
result  that  the  proprietors  of  the  store  finally  faced  the 
inevitable:  the  need  of  making  a  real  addition  to  their 
plant,  not  a  series  of  picayune  little  extensions,  but  one 
fine,  sweeping  move  which  should  be  as  distinct  a  step 
forward  in  Macy  progress  as  the  mighty  hegira  that 
occurred  when  the  store  moved  north  from  Fourteenth 
Street  to  Thirty-fourth — a  little  more  than  eighteen 
years  ago. 

And,  facing  the  inevitable,  Macy's  quickly  made  up 
its  mind.  It  never  has  been  noted  for  any  particular 
hesitancy.  It  decided  to  step  ahead. 

Forecasting  tomorrow  in  New  York  is  not,  after  all, 
so  vast  a  task  as  it  might  seem  to  be  at  a  careless  first 
glance.  That  is,  if  you  do  not  put  your  tomorrow  too 
far  ahead — say  more  than  ten  or  a  dozen  years  at  the 
most.  I  am  perfectly  willing  to  sit  in  these  beginning 
days  of  1922  and  to  assert  that  to  attempt  to  forecast 
1952  or  even  1942  is  not  a  particularly  alluring 
pastime — if  one  has  any  real  desire  for  accuracy.  But 
1932  is  not  so  difficult.  It  is  the  business  of  skilled 
experts  to  interpret  1932  in  1922;  a  business  which 
incidentally  is  rendered  vastly  easier  in  New  York  today 


258  The  Romance  of  a  Great  Store 

than  it  was  ten  years  ago  by  two  hard  and  settled 
facts — the  one,  the  wonderfully  efficient  new  zoning 
plan  of  the  city,  and  the  other,  the  construction  of  the 
Pennsylvania  Railroad  Station  on  Seventh  and  Eighth 
Avenues,  from  Thirty-first  to  Thirty-third  Streets. 

The  first  of  these  factors  should  hold  the  strictly 
commercial  development  of  the  city — save  for  local 
outlying  hubs  or  centers — south  of  Fifty-ninth  Street. 
The  block-a-year  uptown  movement  of  Manhattan  for 
whole  decades  past  has  finally  been  haltedj  and  halted 
effectually.  Central  Park  has  of  course  proved  no 
little  barrier  in  fixing  Fifty-ninth  Street  as  the  arbitrary 
point  of  stoppage.  But  the  zoning  law,  protecting  the 
fine  residence  streets  north  of  that  point,  and  the 
Pennsylvania  Station  are  also  factors  not  to  be 
overlooked. 

True  it  is  that  at  the  very  moment  that  these  para- 
graphs are  being  written  whole  groups  of  new  business 
buildings  are  being  opened,  in  Fifty-seventh,  Fifty- 
eighth  and  Fifty-ninth  Streets,  in  the  center  of  Man- 
hattan. But  other  and  bigger  buildings  are  going  up 
in  the  cross-streets  far  to  the  south  of  these.  Count 
that  much  for  the  Pennsylvania  Station.  For  it,  and  it 
alone,  has  proved  the  salvation  of  Thirty-fourth  Street. 
Macy's,  Altman's,  McCreery's,  the  Waldorf-Astoria, 
the  Hotel  McAlpin — none  of  these  alone  nor  all  of 
them  together — might  have  been  able  to  save  Thirty- 
fourth  Street  from  becoming  another  Fourteenth,  or 
another  Twenty-third — a  dull,  wide  thoroughfare 
given  almost  entirely  in  its  later  days  to  wholesale 
trade  of  one  sort  or  another. 


In  Which  Macy's  Prepares  to  Build  Anew     259 

The  Pennsylvania  Station  could  do,  and  did  do,  the 
trick.  Opened  in  1910 — but  eight  years  after  Macy's 
came  first  to  Thirty-fourth  Street  and  that  brisk 
thoroughfare  of  today  was  in  the  very  youth  of  its 
prosperity — the  traffic  which  it  handled  day  by  day  and 
month  by  month  at  that  time  was  more  than  doubled 
in  1920.  Not  only  has  the  business  of  the  parent  road 
that  occupies  it  practically  doubled  in  that  decade,  but 
the  inclusion  of  the  important  through  trains  of  the 
Baltimore  &  Ohio  and  the  Lehigh  Valley  Railroads,  to 
say  nothing  of  the  traffic  of  the  huge  suburban  Long 
Island  system  increasing  by  leaps  and  bounds  each 
twelvemonth,  has  begun  at  last  to  tax  the  facilities  of  a 
structure  seemingly  far  too  big  ever  to  be  severely 
taxed.  In  recent  months  the  cementing  of  a  closer 
traffic  alliance  between  the  New  Haven  and  the  Penn- 
sylvania systems  renders  it  a  foregone  conclusion  that 
more  and  more  of  the  through  trains  from  New 
England  will  be  brought  to  the  big  white-pillared 
station  in  Seventh  Avenue. 

You  cannot  down  a  street  on  which  there  stands  a 
city  gateway,  particularly  if  the  city  gateway  be  one 
through  which  there  sweeps  all  the  way  from  fifty  to 
sixty  thousand  folk  a  day.  Thirty-fourth  Street  can- 
not be  downed.  Remember  that,  if  you  will.  It  will 
not  be  compelled  to  share  the  rather  bitter  fate  of  its 
former  wide-set  compeers  just  to  the  south.  This 
much  is  known  today. 

And  being  known,  it  settles  forever  even  the  possi- 
bility of  Macy's  moving  uptown  once  again.  It,  too,  is 
fixed.  It  has  cast  its  die  with  the  street  called  Thirty- 


260  The  Romance  of  a  Great  Store 

fourth  and  with  Thirty-fourth  it  is  going  to  remain. 
So  Macy's  buys  the  realty  to  the  west  of  its  present 
building  and  prepares  thereon  to  erect,  in  connection 
with  its  present  edifice,  a  great  new  store  building — in 
ground  space  one  hundred  and  twenty-five  by  two 
hundred  feet — in  height,  nineteen  full  floors  above  the 
street  (and  two  basements  beneath) — in  all,  some 
500,000  square  feet  of  floor-space  or  close  to  fifty  per 
cent,  added  to  the  1,100,000  square  feet  of  the  present 
store. 

Offhand,  it  would  seem  to  be  a  comparatively  easy 
matter  for  the  proprietors  of  a  store,  such  as  Macy's, 
to  go  to  their  architect  and  say  to  him: 

"Here  is  a  fine  plot,  one  hundred  and  twenty-five 
feet  by  two  hundred.  We  want  you  to  design  and 
build  for  us  upon  it  a  modern  retail  building — high 
enough  to  provide  all  necessary  facilities  and  scientific 
enough  to  bring  it  not  merely  abreast  of  other  stores 
across  the  land,  but  a  good  long  jump  ahead  of  them." 

After  which  the  architect  would  call  for  his  young 
men  and  their  draughting-boards  and  proceed,  upon 
white  paper,  to  erect  his  department-store. 

But  his  problem  in  this  case  is  not  white  paper — at 
least  white  paper  undefiled.  The  real  problem  is  a 
perfectly  good  store  building  at  the  east  end  of  the 
Macy  plot — a  building  far  too  good  and  far  too  modern 
to  be  "scrapped" — in  any  recognized  sense  of  the  word. 
It  was  built  to  last  all  the  way  from  half  a  century  to  a 
full  century  and  its  owners  have  not  the  slightest  inten- 
tion of  pulling  it  down.  It  must  remain  the  chief 
front  of  the  enlarged  Macy  store.  The  caryatides 


In  Which  Macy's  Prepares  to  Build  Anew     261 

upon  either  side  of  its  main  doors,  the  red  star  that 
surmounts  them,  must  continue  to  look  down  into  busy 
Broadway,  as  they  have  been  looking  for  nearly  two 
decades  past. 

It  happens,  too,  that  the  store  itself  was  never  de- 
signed for  extensions  toward  the  west.  In  the  concep- 
tion of  its  original  architect  there  was  a  distinct  section 
set  out  at  the  west  end  of  the  present  building  for 
purely  service  and  non-selling  purposes.  These  in- 
cluded, upon  the  ground-floor,  the  great  tunnel  and 
merchandise  unloading  docks  for  incoming  trucks, 
similar  ones  for  the  outgoing  merchandise,  freight 
elevators  a-plenty  j  and  in  between  them  and  through 
them  a  truly  vast  variety  of  working  provision,  shops, 
offices,  school  and  comfort  rooms,  and  the  like.  A 
good  feature,  this  section — which  occupies  almost  the 
exact  site  of  the  former  Koster  &  Bial  Theater — but 
tremendously  in  the  way  when  one  comes  to  consider 
the  extension  of  the  store  toward  the  west. 

A  final  factor  of  this  particular  reconstruction 
problem — and  perhaps  the  greatest  of  all — lies  in  the 
fact  that  it  must  be  carried  forward  while  the  store  is 
doing  its  regular  business.  Even  when  the  peak  load 
of  its  traffic  is  reached — those  fearfully  hard  weeks  that 
immediately  precede  the  Christmas  holiday — the  work- 
aday routine  of  Macy's  must  not  be  seriously  disturbed. 
Which  complicates  vastly  the  architect's  problem. 
It  is  one  thing  to  design  and  to  erect  a  store  building 
whose  tenant  does  not  approach  the  structure  with  his 
wares  for  sale  until  the  merchant  has  given  his  final 
release,  and  another — infinitely  harder — thing  to  build, 


262  The  Romance  of  a  Great  Store 

and  build  efficiently,  as  business  goes  forward  all  the 
while.  The  machine  as  it  grinds  must  be  rebuilded. 
And  all  the  while  it  must  lose  none  of  its  efficiency. 

Yet,  when  all  is  said  and  done,  an  architect's  life  is 
made  up  of  a  number  of  things  of  this  sort.  And  the 
associated  architects  of  the  new  Macy  store — Messrs. 
Robert  D.  Kohn  and  William  S.  Holden — have  not 
permitted  the  overwhelming  problem  of  its  reconstruc- 
tion to  fill  them  with  anything  even  remotely  approach- 
ing a  state  of  panic.  For  that  is  not  an  architect's  way. 

They  have,  from  the  beginning,  come  toward  the  big 
problem  quietly,  sanely  and  efficiently.  At  the  very 
beginning  and  in  company  with  two  of  the  officers  of  the 
corporation  they  went  upon  an  extended  trip  through 
the  more  modern  department-stores  across  the  land. 
Here,  there,  everywhere,  they  found  features  worth 
noting  and  collating.  When  they  were  done  with  their 
journeys  they  had,  as  a  foundation  for  their  studies 
upon  the  new  Macy  store,  a  sort  of  standardized  prac- 
tice of  most  of  its  fellows  across  the  land. 

This  preliminary  completed,  the  engineering  mem- 
ber of  the  partnership,  Mr.  Holden,  began  an  intensive 
study  of  the  fundamental  factors  of  the  business 
machine  that  he  was  to  enlarge.  To  begin  with  there 
was  its  traffic — divided,  as  we  have  seen  in  earlier  chap- 
ters, into  three  great  and  fairly  distinct  avenues:  the 
merchandise,  the  shoppers  who  come  to  purchase  it,  and 
the  employees  who  wait  upon  their  needs. 

It  is  fairly  essential  that  these  three  streams  of  traffic 
be  kept  separate,  save  at  such  points  where,  for  the 


In  Which  Macy's  Prepares  to  Build  Anew     263 

conduct  of  the  business,  they  must  be  brought  together. 

Here,  then,  was  a  real  opportunity  for  study.  Mr. 
Holden  began  with  the  traffic  streams  of  the  shoppers. 

Obviously,  and  despite  the  growing  importance  and 
activity  of  the  Pennsylvania  Station,  to  say  nothing  of 
the  west  side  subway,  which  runs  down  Seventh  Avenue 
in  front  of  it,  the  main  traffic  streams  of  shoppers  must 
continue  to  come  into  Macy's  from  Broadway.  The 
star  of  Broadway  is  even  more  firmly  set  in  the  heavens 
of  New  York  than  that  of  Thirty-fourth  Street. 

These  main  traffic  streams  within  the  store  are,  then, 
roughly  speaking,  three  in  number j  one  comes  from  the 
northeast  corner — at  Thirty-fifth  Street — another  from 
the  southeast  corner  at  Thirty-fourth  Street — the  third 
still  shows  a  decided  fondness  for  the  impressive  center 
doors  upon  Broadway.  Within  the  store  they  unite 
and  then  separate  into  a  variety  of  smaller  currents.  A 
goodly  portion  of  these  violate  all  the  similes  of  streams 
and  proceed  upstairs  at  the  rate  of  about  10,300  folk 
an  hour  at  the  busiest  times  of  busy  days.  And  there 
are  an  astonishingly  large  number  of  these  times.  Of 
these  10,300,  about  7,400  will  ascend  upon  the  great 
escalator,  which  reaches  up  into  the  sixth,  or  last  selling 
floor,  of  the  present  store. 

When  this  escalator  was  first  built,  eighteen  years 
ago,  it  was  looked  upon  as  hardly  less  than  a  transporta- 
tion marvel.  Every  similar  device  that  had  preceded 
it  was  known  as  a  single-file  moving-stairway,  with  the 
capacity  estimated  at  sixty  persons  a  minute,  or  3,600  an 
hour.  By  making  its  escalator  double-file,  Macy's  not 
only  slightly  more  than  doubled  its  capacity  but 


264  The  Romance  of  a  Great  Store 

rendered  it  the  full  equivalent  of  at  least  twenty-five 
passenger  elevators  of  the  largest  size. 

The  man  whose  business  it  is  to  have  a  sort  of  first- 
hand acquaintance  with  1932  said  that  by  that  year 
Macy's  would  need  to  take  close  to  twenty  thousand 
folk  an  hour  to  its  upper  floors.  He  was  not  only 
estimating  upon  the  growth  of  New  York,  but  upon 
the  growth  of  the  store  itself. 

"You  will  have  to  add  another  of  the  double 
escalators,"  said  he,  "that  will  bring  your  lifting 
capacity  upon  the  two  moving  stairways  up  to  almost 
fifteen  thousand  persons  an  hour." 

An  elevator  of  modern  size  and  speed  in  a  depart- 
ment-store with  seven  or  eight  selling  floors  ought  to 
lift  two  hundred  and  forty  persons  an  hour.  This,  as 
you  can  quickly  find  out  for  yourself,  means  that  there 
will  be  needed  for  the  new  store  but  twenty  passenger 
elevators  to  make  good  that  deficit  between  increased 
escalator  capacity  and  the  total  number  of  folk  to  be 
carried  upstairs.  And  this,  in  itself,  is  a  most  moderate 
increase.  The  store  already  has  fourteen  modern  pas- 
senger elevators.  Credit  this  much,  if  you  will,  to  the 
escalator. 

So  it  goes,  then,  that  the  new  Macy's  will  have  a 
second  double-file  escalator  on  the  opposite  side  of  the 
main  aisle,  which  is  the  store's  own  Broadway,  and  in 
the  same  relative  relation  to  it.  It  will  run  as  far  as 
the  fourth  floor  which  in  the  new  scheme  of  Macy 
things  is  to  be  devoted  to  the  important  business  of 
toy  selling. 


In  Which  Macy's  Pre-pares  to  Build  Anew     265 

What  goes  up  must  come  down.  Shoppers  are  no 
exception  to  this  old  rule.  If  you  still  think  that  they 
are,  stand  late  some  busy  afternoon  at  the  main  stair 
of  Macy's  and  watch  them  descend.  They  frequently 
come  at  the  rate  of  one  hundred  to  the  minute.  And 
yet  this  is  but  a  single  stair! 

It  is  neither  practical  nor  modern  greatly  to  increase 
stairway  capacity  in  remodeling  Macy's  and  so  the 
question  of  a  descending  escalator  thrusts  itself  upon 
the  architects'  attention.  Despite  a  certain  old- 
fashioned  prejudice  against  it  on  the  part  of  some 
old-fashioned  New  Yorkers,  a  descending  escalator  is 
not  only  practicable  but  entirely  safe.  Otherwise 
Macy's  would  not  even  consider  its  installation.  The 
store  planning  experts  went  out  to  Chicago  a  few 
months  ago,  however,  and  into  a  great  retail  estab- 
lishment there  which  boasts  twelve  selling  floors. 
Escalators  were  its  one  salvation — descending,  as  well 
as  ascending.  The  Macy  party  saw  old  ladies,  women 
with  children  in  their  arms — everyone  who  walked, 
save  only  those  walking  upon  crutches,  using  this  quick 
and  constant  method  of  descent.  They  found  the  same 
devices  in  Boston — in  subway  stations  as  well  as  depart- 
ment-stores— and  being  used  with  equal  facility. 
Straightway  they  decided  that  the  New  York  shopper 
was  neither  more  timid  nor  more  reluctant  to  use  a  new 
idea  than  was  her  Boston  or  her  Chicago  sister.  A 
descending  escalator  was  placed  in  the  plans  for  the  new 
Macy's — for  the  use  of  the  store's  patrons. 

Still  another  ascending  and  descending  escalator; 
this  time  for  the  store's  own  family.  Remember  that 


266  The  Romance  of  a  Great  Store 

here  is  a  second  stream,  whose  prompt  and  efficient 
handling  is  quite  as  important  as  that  of  the  shoppers. 
The  broad  stair  in  Thirty-fourth  Street  at  which  the 
majority  of  the  family  arrives,  between  eight-thirty 
and  eight-forty-five  of  the  business  morning,  is  fre- 
quently choked  with  the  rush  of  incoming  employees. 
It  will  never  be  choked  once  the  new  Macy's  is  done. 
For  then  the  workers  will  be  handled  in  great  volume 
upon  a  double  escalator,  not  merely  double-file,  but 
double  in  the  sense  that  ascent  and  descent  are  handled 
simultaneously  and  in  compact  space,  very  much  as  the 
double  stairways  that  are  installed  in  modern  school- 
houses  and  industrial  plants. 

In  the  enlarged  building  the  locker  rooms  and  the 
other  facilities  of  the  arrival  of  the  store's  employees 
will  be  placed  upon  the  second  floor  and  the  first  and 
second  mezzanines  j  retained  from  the  present  plan,  but 
very  greatly  enlarged.  The  Macy  worker  comes  to 
them  by  means  of  the  escalator,  quickly  and  easily,  and 
in  a  similar  fashion  ascends  or  descends  to  his  or  her 
department.  It  sounds  simple  and  easy  but  it  is  not 
quite  so  easy  when  one  comes  to  plan  for  a  maximum 
of  8,800  employees — in  1932. 

A  third  traffic  stream  remains  for  our  consideration — 
and  the  architect's.  In  many  respects  it  is  the  most 
difficult.  Human  beings,  to  a  large  extent  at  least,  can 
move  themselves.  Goods  cannot  Yet  obviously  the 
great  stream  of  merchandise  into  the  building  and  then 
out  again  must  never  be  permitted  to  clog  its  arteries — 
not  for  a  day,  nor  even  for  an  hour.  This  means  that 


In  Which  Macy's  Prepares  to  Build  Anew     267 

there  must  be  not  only  plenty  of  channels  and  conduits 
for  it,  but  ample  reservoir  space  as  well.  Which,  being 
translated,  means  of  course  generous  warehousing 
rooms,  of  one  sort  or  another. 

Perhaps  it  would  be  well  before  we  come  to  the 
ingenious  plans  for  making  this  inanimate  stream  most 
animate  indeed,  to  consider  the  general  plan  of  Macy's 
as  it  will  be  after  its  structural  renaissance.  The 
exterior  of  the  present  great  building  will  remain  prac- 
tically unchanged.  Just  back  of  it  and  to  the  west  of 
it  on  the  new  plot,  one  hundred  and  twenty-five  feet  in 
depth  in  both  Thirty-fourth  and  Thirty-fifth  Streets, 
and  extending  the  full  two  hundred  feet  between  them, 
will  be  erected  a  new  steel  and  concrete  building,  har- 
monizing in  its  facade  and  of  the  most  modern  type  of 
construction;  as  we  have  already  seen,  nineteen  stories 
in  height  with  two  sub-basements  in  addition.  The 
first  ten  stories  of  this  structure,  at  the  exact  floor  levels 
of  the  old,  will  be  thrown  into  the  existing  building  and 
the  lower  seven  of  them  used  for  selling  purposes. 
The  uppermost  three  stories  of  the  combined  build- 
ing— covering  the  entire  Macy  site — will  be  used,  as 
we  shall  see  in  a  moment  or  two,  for  the  reception  and 
the  warehousing  of  the  merchandise,  and  other  non- 
selling  activities  of  the  store. 

The  nine  stories  of  the  new  addition  which  will  rise 
tower-like  above  the  parent  building  are  destined  to  be 
used  entirely  for  non-selling  functions.  Thus  from 
the  architects'  plans  we  see  the  executive  and  financial 
offices,  including  that  of  advertising  upon  the  thir- 
teenth and  the  fifteenth  floors  of  this  super-cupola j 


268  The  Romance  of  a  Great  Store 

and  the  store's  own  great  laundry  upon  the  high 
nineteenth.  The  department  of  training  and  the 
bureau  of  planning,  with  an  assembly  room,  will  share 
the  sixteenth.  The  more  purely  recreational  features, 
however,  the  Men's  Club  and  the  Community  Club  and 
the  lounging  rooms  and  library,  are  placed  as  low  as 
the  accessible  eighth  floor.  The  general  manager's 
and  employment  offices  will  be  as  low  as  the  second 
mezzanine — for  obvious  reasons  of  convenience. 

None  of  these  departments  will  be  hampered  for  a 
long  time  to  come,  as  they  have  been  hampered  for  a 
number  of  years  past,  by  a  fearful  lack  of  elbow  room. 
The  new  plans  have  provided  for  abundant  facilities 
of  this  and  every  other  sort.  The  employees'  cafe- 
terias also  are  to  go  into  the  new  section — also  upon  the 
eighth,  or  public  restaurant  floor.  They  will  be  greatly 
enlarged  over  their  present  capacity. 

These  non-selling  facilities  are  given  their  own 
elevator  service  from  the  street  j  a  separate  and  distinct 
entrance  there.  The  purpose  of  this  last  quickly 
becomes  evident.  There  are  many  occasions — nights 
and  Sundays  even — when  some  or  all  of  the  recreation 
facilities  are  in  use  far  beyond  the  regular  store  hours. 
Access  to  them,  entirely  free  and  separate  from  the 
store  itself,  is  an  enormous  working  convenience,  and 
the  new  Macy's  has  been  planned  to  be  filled  with 
working  convenieneee. 

The  elevator  as  well  as  the  escalator  will  play  a  vastly 
important  part  in  the  fabrication  of  the  new  Macy's. 
The  one  has  by  no  means  been  overshadowed  by  the 


In  Which  Macy's  Prepares  to  Build  Anew     269 

growing  importance  of  the  other.  There  are  to  be  in 
all  fifty-six  elevators,  of  one  type  or  another,  in  the 
reconstructed  building.  Of  all  these  none  is  more 
interesting  than  the  ingenious  lifts  by  which  whole 
motor  trucks,  laden  as  well  as  empty,  are  carried  into 
the  structure,  up  eleven  floors  to  the  merchandising 
reception  rooms  and  down  into  the  basement  and  sub- 
basement  for  filling  for  the  city  delivery. 

Now  are  we  back  again  to  the  handling  of  that  mer- 
chandise stream  which  we  first  began  to  consider  but  a 
moment  ago.  At  the  beginning  we  can  make  assertion 
that  in  the  entire  history  of  retail  selling  no  more 
ingenious  scheme  has  been  devised  for  the  orderly  and 
rapid  movement  of  goods  in  and  out  of  a  department- 
store. 

This  flow  is  kept  normal  and  downward  by  the  simple 
process  of  first  taking  the  loaded  incoming  trucks  up  to 
the  eleventh  floor  of  the  building  for  unloading.  In 
the  present  store — as  well  as  in  a  good  many  other 
stores — a  great  amount  of  immensely  valuable  ground 
floor  space  is  given  over  to  the  various  functions  of 
receiving  and  distributing  merchandise.  We  have  seen 
long  ago  how  a  modern  store  values  this  ground  floor 
space.  For  instance,  in  relation  to  the  value  of,  let  us 
say,  the  third  floor,  it  is  about  as  ten  to  one. 

Neither  does  Macy's  propose  to  clutter  the  sidewalk 
frontage  of  even  the  least  important  of  its  frontage 
streets — Thirty-fifth  Street — by  long  lines  of  motor 
trucks  or  drays,  receiving  or  discharging  goods.  In 
fact  this  sort  of  thing  has  become  practically  impossible 
in  the  really  important  cities  of  the  America  of  today. 


270  The  Romance  of  a  Great  Store 

If  municipal  ordinance  permits  it,  public  sentiment 
rarely  does.  And  the  keen  merchant  of  today — to  say 
nothing  of  tomorrow — never  ignores  public  sentiment. 

So,  to  the  eleventh  floor  the  motor  trucks  must  go — 
on  two  huge  high-speed  freight  elevators  which  open 
directly  into  Thirty-fifth  Street.  Our  horseless  age 
makes  this  possible.  The  modern  architect,  planning 
for  the  congested  heart  of  the  island  of  Manhattan,  can 
indeed  and  reverently  thank  God  for  the  coming  of  the 
gasoline  engine  and  the  electric  storage  battery — to  say 
nothing  of  the  engineers  who  helped  to  make  them 
possible. 

Upon  that  eleventh  floor  there  will  extend,  for  the 
full  width  of  the  building,  a  giant  quay,  or  high-level 
platform,  with  its  stout  floor  at  the  exact  level  of  the 
floors  of  the  standardized  motor  trucks  of  Macy's  (the 
comparatively  small  proportion  of  "foreign"  or  outside 
vehicles  that  bring  merchandise  to  the  store  are  to  be 
unloaded  at  the  Thirty-fifth  Street  doorways  and  not 
admitted  within  the  building).  The  unloading  under 
the  present  well-developed  system  is  a  short  matter  j  the 
trucks  may  quickly  be  despatched  back  to  the  street  once 
again  j  while  the  refuse  and  debris  of  the  packers  goes 
to  appropriate  bins  behind  them. 

Through  chutes  and  sliding-ways  the  merchandise 
descends  a  single  floor  to  the  great  tenth  story — extend- 
ing through  both  the  present  building  and  the  new  one 
to  come.  Here  it  will  be  quickly  classified  and  placed 
upon  a  conveyor  which  moves  at  the  level  of  and 
between  the  two  sides  of  a  double  table  some  five  or 


In  Which  Macy's  Prepares  to  Build  Anew     271 

six  hundred  feet  in  length  which  will  extend  the  greater 
part  of  the  length  of  the  enlarged  store.  From  this 
center  table — the  backbone  of  the  whole  scheme  of  this 
particular  distribution — will  extend  in  parallel  aisles  at 
right  angles  to  it,  whole  hundreds  of  bins  and  shelves 
and  compartments.  The  entire  arrangement  will 
resemble  nothing  so  much  as  a  huge  double  gridiron, 
with  many  tiny  interstices. 

Now  do  you  begin  to  see  the  operation  of  this 
scheme?  If  not,  let  me  endeavor  to  make  it  more  clear 
to  you.  This  miniature  and  silent  city,  whose  straight 
and  regular  streets  are  lined  in  turn  with  miniature 
apartment  houses  of  merchandise,  is  zoned — into  six 
great  zones.  Every  selling  department  of  the  store — 
1 1 8  in  the  present  one — is  assigned  to  one  or  the  other 
of  these  zones.  There  it  keeps  its  reserve  stock.  It 
is,  in  truth,  a  reservoir. 

Now,  see  the  plan  function!  The  men's  shoe 
department  is  out  of  a  certain  small  part  of  its  highly 
diversified  stock.  It  sends  a  requisition  up  to  its  repre- 
sentative upon  the  tenth  floor.  It  is  a  matter  of 
minutes — almost  of  seconds — to  locate  the  necessary 
cartons  in  the  simplified  and  scientifically  arranged 
compartments  and  shelves;  a  matter  certainly  of 
mere  seconds  to  despatch  them  down  to  the  selling 
department. 

For  this,  the  second  thrust  of  the  goods-stream 
through  the  new  Macy's,  especial  provisions  have  been 
made  by  the  installation  of  six  so-called  utility  units. 
Three  of  these  are  placed  at  equal  intervals  along  the 
Thirty-fourth  Street  wall  of  the  enlarged  building  j 


272  The  Romance  of  a  Great  Store 

the  other  three  at  equal  intervals  upon  its  Thirty-fifth 
Street  edge.  Each  unit  consists  of  one  elevator  (large 
enough  to  hold  two  of  the  rolling-carts,  standardized 
for  the  floor  movement  of  merchandise  through  the 
aisles  of  the  selling  departments  of  the  store),  one  small 
dummy  elevator  (for  the  handling  of  single  packages 
of  unusual  size  or  type),  and  a  spiral  chute  (this  last 
for  the  despatch  of  sold  goods). 

The  selling-floor  location  of  these  utility  units  deter- 
mines the  zoning  system  of  the  warehouses  on  the  tenth. 
There  is  a  zone  to  each  unit.  While  from  that  zone  the 
requisitioned  merchandise  descends  to  the  selling 
department  which  has  asked  for  it  by  its  own  unit — 
which  always  is  closest  to  it.  Haul  is  reduced  to  a  min- 
imum. And  system  becomes  simplicity. 

With  the  actual  selling  of  the  goods  in  the  store  that 
is  to  come  we  have  no  concern  at  this  moment.  It  is 
quite  enough  to  say  that  the  methods  and  the  ideals  that 
have  brought  Macy  selling  up  to  its  present  point  are 
to  be  continued  there,  in  the  main  at  least,  although 
broadened  and  advanced  as  future  necessity  may  dictate. 
But  with  the  despatch  of  the  goods  once  sold  in  the  new 
store  we  have  an  intimate  and  personal  interest. 

We  have  bought  our  pair  of  shoes.  The  financial 
end  of  the  transaction  is  concluded.  We  have  asked — 
as  most  of  us  ask — to  have  them  delivered.  Now 
follow  their  movement: 

The  clerk  takes  them  to  the  packer.  This,  however, 
is  but  a  mere  detail.  It  is  their  future  course  that 
interests  us.  And  if  we  had  eyes  properly  X-rayed 


In  Which  Macy's  Prepares  to  Build  Anew     273 

and  farseeing  we  might  observe  that  from  the  hands 
of  the  packer  they  will  go  presently  to  the  spiral 
descending  chute  of  the  nearest  utility  unit. 

Now  we  shall  indeed  need  our  new  X-ray  eyes. 
They  follow  the  package  for  us — down  the  chute — 
with  its  gradients  and  curvatures  so  cleverly  devised  as 
to  bring  our  purchase  to  the  basement  in  just  the  right 
time  and  in  just  the  right  order — and  into  and  upon  the 
next  stage  of  its  progress. 

Steadily  moving  conveyor-belts  along  each  outer  wall 
of  the  building  receive  the  constant  droppage  of  the 
packages  from  the  six  spirals  of  the  utility  units. 
Together  these  two  long  belts  converge  upon  a  ter- 
minal, the  revolving-table,  in  the  terminology  of  the 
present  store.  And  here  our  packages  receive  fresh 
personal  attention. 

In  the  chapter  upon  Macy's  delivery  department  we 
paid  a  careful  attention  to  this  revolving-table — which 
really  is  not  a  table  at  all  and  does  not  revolve.  We 
saw  it,  then,  as  the  very  heart  of  the  complex  clearing- 
house of  Macy  distributions.  It  is,  however,  in  itself 
a  wonderfully  simple  thing,  and  yet  when  it  was  first 
installed  it  was  regarded  as  nothing  less  than  a  triumph 
of  efficiency. 

Fortunately  we  do  progress  in  this  gray  old  world. 
Today  we  see  how  the  revolving-table  can  be  improved. 
For  one  thing,  today  we  see  it  cramped  and  inelastic — 
no  more  than  eight  men  may  work  at  it  at  a  single  shift. 
Yet  when  it  was  built  no  one  in  Macy's  dreamed  that 
more  than  eight  men  would  ever  be  required  to  work 


274  The  Romattce  of  a  Great  Store 

at  it  at  a  single  time.  And  even  in  times  of  great 
emergency,  but  eight! 

At  the  revolving-table  in  the  new  store,  not  eight  but 
forty  men  may  work  simultaneously — when  necessity 
dictates.  The  change  has  been  effected  by  the  simple 
process  of  elongating  the  "table."  If  a  revolving-ring 
may  be  changed  from  round  to  square — and  this  was 
the  very  thing  that  Macy's  accomplished  in  its  present 
basement — why  not  from  square  to  oblong?  There  is 
no  negative  answer  to  this  question.  And  oblong  it 
will  become.  And  a  present  handling  capacity  of  forty 
thousand  packages  a  day  can  be  increased  to  all  the  way 
from  seventy-five  thousand  to  ninety  thousand. 

Yet  the  main  principle  changes  not.  It  is  only  in 
detail  that  one  sees  one's  shoes  traveling  outward  on  a 
different  path  in  1931  from  that  of  1921.  The  great 
conveyors  that  lead  from  the  revolving-table  of  today 
to  the  various  delivery  classifications  as  they  are  now 
made,  will  so  lead  in  the  new  arrangement  of  things  to 
such  classifications  as  may  then  be  made:  only  they  will 
no  longer  be  revolving-tables,  but  will  in  due  time 
become  the  moving  backbone  of  very  long  tables  in  the 
basement  mezzanine,  similar  to  the  one  which  we  saw 
extending  the  full  length  of  the  great  tenth  floor.  And 
from  those  long  tables,  running  the  entire  width  of  the 
building  and  up  just  under  the  basement  ceiling,  the 
sheet-writers  will  recognize  their  individual  group  of 
packages  (by  means  of  the  clearly  written  numerals 
upon  them),  lift  them  off  the  slowly  moving  belt  and 
make  record  of  them,  for  the  delivery  department's 
own  protection.  After  which,  it  is  but  the  twist  of  the 


In  Which  Macy's  Prepares  to  Build  Anew     275 

wrist  to  thrust  them  into  the  bins,  separately  assigned 
to  each  driver's  run. 

So  go  our  shoes,  or  come,  if  you  prefer  to  have  it 
that  way.  Rapidly,  orderly,  systematically.  System 
never  departs  from  their  handling.  Even  in  the 
driver's  own  little  compartment-bin  there  are  four 
levels,  or  shelves,  and  each  is  inclined  gently  and 
floored  with  rollers  so  that  he  can  pick  out  the  packages 
for  his  run  with  greater  facility.  And  in  placing  the 
packages  upon  each  of  these  levels,  the  sheet-writer, 
well  trained  to  his  job,  begins  a  rough  process  of  assort- 
ment by  streets. 

Now  we  are  come  to  wagon  delivery,  itself.  Now 
we  shall  see  why  Macy's  will  not  have  to  clutter  Thirty- 
fourth  Street  with  a  long  row  of  its  delivery  trucks. 
The  length  of  such  a  row  may  easily  be  estimated  when 
one  realizes  that  sixty  electric  trucks  will  stand  simul- 
taneously at  sixty  loading  stations  in  the  new  basement, 
with  a  reserve  or  reservoir  space  there  for  twenty-two 
more.  Moreover,  this  basement  will  serve  as  a  garage 
at  night  and  on  Sundays  for  these  trucks.  There  is  no 
fire  risk  whatsoever  in  the  storage  of  an  electrically 
driven  motor  vehicle.  So  the  new  Macy  basement  will 
not  only  be  able  to  store  this  considerable  fleet  but  to 
charge  its  batteries  and  make  necessary  light  repairs 
upon  it  from  time  to  time. 

Access  to  and  from  this  basement — and  the  sub-base- 
ment— is  by  means  of  elevators;  not  only  the  two 
which  we  have  seen  reaching  aloft  to  the  eleventh  floor, 
but  two  more  just  beside  them  for  sole  service  between 


2j6  The  Romance  of  a  Great  Store 

the  level  and  the  two  basements.  As  a  matter  of 
operating  expediency  it  will  be  easy  indeed  to  arrange 
in  the  early  morning  rush,  or  at  any  other  time  when 
emergency  may  so  demand,  to  operate  all  four  elevators 
in  exclusive  service  between  the  street  and  basements. 
With  such  a  battery  Macy's  can  perform  a  genuine 
rapid-fire  of  discharging  merchandise. 

To  the  mind  of  the  novice  there  immediately  flashes 
the  thought:  why  not  use  ramps — long,  sloping  drive- 
ways— from  the  street  level  to  the  basement?  Long 
ago  the  architects  of  the  new  building  asked  themselves 
that  very  question.  It  was,  in  this  particular  case  at 
least,  rather  hard  to  answer.  The  main  basement  of 
Macy's  is  very  high.  To  install  a  ramp — double- 
tracked,  of  course,  for  vehicles  both  ascending  and 
descending — of  any  easy  practical  grade  would  there- 
fore have  required  a  great  deal  of  valuable  floor-space. 
So,  for  the  moment,  they  dismissed  the  ramp  idea  for 
motor  trucks  and  held  to  that  of  elevators.  The 
Boston  Store  in  Chicago  solved  the  problem.  It  is  the 
same  store  that  has  successfully  installed  descending 
escalators,  floor  upon  floor. 

Out  of  the  sub-basement  of  that  Chicago  store  the 
Macy  investigators  saw  thirty-two  cars  come,  all  inside 
of  eight  minutes  j  and  all  upon  elevators.  That  settled 
the  question  for  the  big  shop  in  Herald  Square.  Ele- 
vators it  should  have  for  this  service,  and  elevators  it 
will  have,  even  for  the  big  five-ton  trucks  that  go  into 
the  deep  sub-basement  for  the  hampers  for  suburban 
delivery  as  well  as  large  special  packages.  Furniture, 
however,  as  in  the  present  store,  will  be  both  sold  and 


In  Which  Macy's  Prepares  to  Build  Anew     277 

packed  and  shipped  from  an  upper  floor  of  its  own,  the 
large  truck  elevators  to  the  eleventh  floor  being  also 
used  for  this  purpose. 

The  sub-basement  of  the  new  plan  is  in  so  many 
respects  a  replica  of  the  main  basement  delivery  service 
that  it  requires  no  special  description  here.  It,  too, 
has  been  designed,  not  only  amply  large  enough  for  the 
present  needs  of  Macy's,  but  for  that  mythical  traffic  of 
1932,  which  we  now  know  is  really  not  mythical  at  all, 
but  a  matter  of  rather  exact  scientific  reckoning. 

Architects'  drawings  are  indeed  fascinating  things  j 
doubly  fascinating  when  one  comes  to  consider  all  the 
infinite  thought  and  labor  and  patience  which  have 
entered  into  their  fabrication.  I  shall  not,  however, 
carry  you  further  into  the  details  of  the  plans  for  the 
new  Macy's.  You  now  have  seen  enough  to  give  you 
at  least  a  fair  idea  of  the  main  structure  for  the 
enlarged  store.  You  have  seen  how  carefully  and  how 
ingeniously  the  great  main  traffic  streams  through  the 
huge  edifice  are  to  be  carried — to  be  brought  together, 
when  they  needs  must  be  brought  together,  and  kept 
apart  when  properly  they  should  be  kept  apart.  Add, 
in  your  own  mind,  to  this  fundamental  structure,  all  of 
the  refinements  which  you  expect  to  find  in  the  modern 
retail  establishment  today  and  you  may  begin  to  depict 
for  yourself  the  Macy's  that  is  to  come — to  construct 
for  yourself  at  least  a  partial  vision  of  the  year  1932  in 
Herald  Square. 


II.     L'Envoi 

YESTERDAY  Milady  of  Manhattan  in  her  hoop- 
skirt  and  crinoline  j  today  Milady  in  thick  furs 
above  her  knees  and  thin  silk  stockings  and  high-heeled 
pumps  below  them:  tomorrow  .  .  . 

Why  will  you  persist  in  dragging  in  tomorrow?  Is 
it  not  enough  to  know  that  tomorrow  Milady  of  the 
great  metropolis  of  the  Americas  will  still  be  shopping? 
You  may  set  tomorrow  a  year  hence,  twenty  years  hence, 
fifty  years  in  the  misty  future  that  is  to  come  upon  us 
and  still  make  that  statement  in  perfect  safety.  And 
twenty  years,  fifty  years,  a  hundred  years  hence,  even, 
Macy's  should  still  be  in  Herald  Square  ready  to  wait 
Upon  her  needs  and  upon  the  needs  of  her  men  and 
children,  too. 

To  forecast  far  into  the  future  is  indeed  dangerous. 
Only  rash  men  undertake  it.  We  know  that  1932  is 
one  thing,  but  that  1952  or  even  1942  is  quite  another 
one.  A  savant  of  uptown  Manhattan,  who  has  a  nice 
facility  for  handling  census  figures,  not  long  ago  pre- 
dicted that  by  1950  little  old  New  York  would  hold 
within  its  boundaries  sixteen  million  people.  He  may 
know.  I  don't.  And  you  are  privileged  to  take  your 
guess — with  one  man's  guess  almost  if  not  quite  as  good 
as  another's. 

A  New  York  of  sixteen  million  souls  is  an  alluring 

279 


280  The  Romance  of  a  Great  Store 

picture,  if  a  bewildering  one,  withal.  It  is  a  fairly 
bewildering  town  with  its  six  million  of  today.  But  I 
have  not  the  slightest  doubt  that  Rowland  Hussey 
Macy  said  the  selfsame  thing  of  the  New  York  of  six 
hundred  and  fifty  thousand  souls,  to  which  he  first 
came,  away  back  there  in  1858. 

And  the  Macy's  of  1952,  serving  its  fair  and  goodly 
portion  of  those  sixteen  million  souls,  is  indeed  an 
alluring  picture,  which  you  may  best  construct  for 
yourself.  The  store,  itself,  does  well  when  it  plans  so 
definitely  for  1932.  Nevertheless,  before  you  finally 
close  the  pages  of  this  book,  I  should  like  to  have  it 
record  a  final  picture  upon  your  mind.  It  is  the  picture 
of  a  really  great  store.  It  runs  from  Broadway  to 
Seventh  Avenue,  perhaps  all  the  way  to  Eighth.  It 
begins  at  Thirty-fourth  Street  and  runs  north — one, 
two,  possibly  even  three  or  four  blocks,  or  goodly  por- 
tions of  them.  It  employs  ten,  twelve,  fifteen  thou- 
sand workers.  There  are  a  thousand  motor  trucks  in 
its  delivery  service — and  a  hundred  aeroplanes  as  well. 
It  has  sixteen  sub-stations,  instead  of  six.  Its  own 
delivery  limits  run  north  to  Peekskill  and  east  to 
Bridgeport  and  to  Huntington  and  west  and  south 
through  at  least  half  of  New  Jersey. 

Yet,  above  all  this  new  enterprise  there  still  towers 
the  high  addition  which  1923  saw  completed  and  added 
to  the  edifice,  with  the  huge  and  flaming  word 
"MACY'S"  emblazoned  by  white  electricity  upon  the 
blackened  skies  of  night,  visible  all  the  way  from 
Seventh  Avenue  to  the  thickly  peopled  range  of  the 
Orange  mountains. 


L*  Envoi  281 

"Macy's,"  whistles  the  small  boy  upon  the  North 
River  ferryboat,  who  has  traveled  afar  with  his 
geography  book.  "Macy's!  That's  a  regular 
Gibraltar  of  a  store!" 

THE   END 


UNIVERSITY  OF  CALIFORNIA,  LOS  ANGELES 

THE  UNIVERSITY  LIBRARY 
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